


Wormwood

by Tenukii



Category: Dream Cycle - H. P. Lovecraft, LOVECRAFT H. P. - Works, Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Dark, Dream World, Hence the title, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Lovecraftian, Lucid Dreaming, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Weirdness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-12
Updated: 2017-07-04
Packaged: 2018-05-13 08:11:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 42,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5701243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tenukii/pseuds/Tenukii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kylo Ren is good at lucid dreaming, but Poe Dameron is as troublesome and irresistible in dreams as he is in real life.  When Kylo and Poe become lost in the dream realm together, the bored chaos deity Nyarlathotep resents Kylo's abilities as a dreamer and decides to punish him by keeping Poe in the Dreamlands forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The first chapter of this sticks pretty close to canon; later chapters diverge from it.

“Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.”  
-H.P. Lovecraft, “The Silver Key”

\--

Kylo Ren was good at lucid dreaming.

He’d heard stories about his grandfather’s dreams, that they were premonitions.  Kylo’s weren’t, but he preferred it that way.  Vader had dreamed of tragedies he could not prevent, and to Kylo’s thinking, knowing the future was useless if it gave you no advantage.  Instead, he savored his own dreams where he could control every detail, living out any idea that occurred to him.  That his dreams were significant at all was enough connection to his grandfather to please him.

He had found that a certain blend of tea helped with the dreams, and although it was frightfully bitter, he drank it with relish.  With enough practice, Kylo eventually no longer needed the tea and could control almost any dream if he wished it.  Sometimes he did not and just let the dream play out as his subconscious directed.  His sleep was more restful that way, and it was interesting to see what his brain would do when he relinquished conscious control.  But when the nightmares came, or when he was frustrated with his still-limited power in the waking universe, Kylo took over and directed his dreams to the outcomes he desired.

He’d heard legends of some beings, strong in the Force, who could travel in their sleep to commune with one another and visit the Dreamlands, a realm in a dimension somewhere other than the physical universe of waking existence.  There was a world there, it was said, not a planet that could be found on any map but a world all the same with its own seas and land, with a moon and an underworld, even, where faceless creatures of shadow flew.  Kylo had tried many times to reach the Dreamlands and could not, his one failure in his dreaming, and so he had come to tell himself it _was_ only a legend after all.  If the dream realm were real, surely the Force and his skill at dreaming would have opened it to him.

And yet he sometimes revisited the legends and sometimes still drank the bitter tea, and he imagined what he would do if he _should_ find his way to the dream world.  Command the faceless flying things, perhaps, or slay Kuranes, the king of the beautiful city that floated where the sea met the sky, so Kylo could take the city for himself.  Sometimes, when he finally calmed after a fit of rage over some frustration in the waking universe, Kylo would stare into the hollow eye sockets of his grandfather’s helmet and imagine bringing the Dark to that city of golden sunset light, making the clouds that swathed it rain down until they rained themselves dry and faded into nothing.  Driving the Light out of that place.  Ruining everything beautiful in _that_ universe, too.

After Hux picked him up and they began the flight back to Snoke—back for him finally to complete Kylo’s training—Kylo slept and tried once more to reach the Dreamlands.  His body ached from the wounds he’d recently sustained, but more than that, his _mind_ ached.  He was frustrated, too baffled now to be angry, by what had happened.  Baffled by the girl called Rey who had risen from nowhere, crossing paths with Kylo’s father briefly as she rose and Han Solo fell.  It was not supposed to be this way: Kylo had destroyed the last thing holding him to the Light.  He had killed his father and shown where his allegiance lay.  And so, _he should have won_.  The girl should have accepted his offer of training. . . or she should have died.

But she did neither of these things, and the universe still insisted on working against him.  The Force still eluded his full command.  Kylo hoped—no, _insisted_ to himself that Snoke would show him his error and just how to bend the Force completely to his will. . . how to turn himself completely to the Dark.

Until then, he would search for the Dreamlands.

But when Kylo Ren slept, he found himself elsewhere.  He knew he was dreaming, knew he was lucid and could control the dream as he wished—save to will himself away to another place.  As ever, the Dreamlands evaded him.  King Kuranes, if he existed, still reigned secure, it seemed.

In his dream, Kylo stood in an interrogation chamber.  He might have expected Rey to be there in the restraints before him; his subconscious could quite reasonably be dwelling upon the girl and Kylo’s inability to best her in either mental or physical combat.  Or he might have expected the restraints to be empty, reminding him of her escape.  Yet neither was the case.

Instead, he dreamed that he was with Poe Dameron.

 _Why?_ Kylo wondered.  Why would his subconscious present him with a captive Dameron, when he had gotten exactly what he needed from the man, when Kylo hadn’t let himself think about Poe in days?  Was it because Dameron had, like Rey, ultimately escaped?

Whatever reason for his presence, the dream version of Dameron was as troublesome as the real one.  He writhed and struggled with his restraints, lips drawn back to reveal gritted teeth.  His face was bruised and bleeding as it had been in real life from the Stormtroopers’ treatment of him, and Dameron’s dark eyes were trying to glare a hole through Kylo’s mask.

He _was_ wearing his mask, Kylo realized for the first time.  Apparatus, Dameron had called it.  A creature, Rey had called _him_.

Kylo spread his right hand over the mask and removed it, dropping it to the ground with a resounding, metallic clank.  Poe— _Dameron_ jumped, startled by the sound, then resumed his struggling.  Kylo took a step toward him and studied him with a curious expression.

“What are you doing here?” Kylo queried in much the same tone he took in interrogations: quiet, as if he were only mildly interested in the response.

Dameron gave a sarcastic bark of a laugh before he retorted, “ _You’re_ the one who had me imprisoned.”

Kylo frowned in thought.  He knew he was really only speaking to a part of himself, but also that this self was playing a role.  He could no more get a true answer to his questions from his own psyche than he could from the real Dameron before Kylo read his mind.  But then there was the paradox: Kylo could also control the dream-Dameron’s responses if he wished.  In a way, it _was_ like reading Poe’s mind: _I can get anything I want from him—but I can’t make him give it willingly._

And maybe _that_ was why he dreamed of Poe Dameron, to work out the frustration building in Kylo.  In the waking universe, obstacles kept throwing themselves in his path.  But in his dreams, Kylo could dispense with any inhibitions, physical or mental, and awake with a clearer, more open mind to receive Snoke’s training.

 _I can kill him_ , Kylo thought, gazing into the resentful, low-lidded eyes that glowered back at him.  Poe’s eyes had always had that look about them, like they were half-closed in a daydream.  Kylo had noticed it when they first met, and he marveled at his subconscious’s ability to recreate every detail about the man so perfectly.

Kylo moved to stand before Dameron with two quick strides, and he lifted his hand—bare, he noticed, no gloves in this dream for some reason—to grasp the captive man’s throat.  Those eyes opened wide enough _then_ , and Dameron’s lips parted to draw in a frightened breath.  Yet he didn’t express his fear or plead for mercy, and a second later, he had masked his apprehension and resumed the smoldering look he had previously held.

Infuriated, Kylo’s already deep voice fell to a snarl as he told Dameron, “I could make you cower and beg for your life if I wanted to.  I could kill you a thousand different ways, or keep you alive and torture you until you beg for your _death_.”

“You could have done that when you were awake!” Poe snapped, rasping from the pressure on his throat.  “Why didn’t you?”

Kylo’s hand dropped, and he took a step back.  Dameron gasped and inhaled sharply.  Kylo could see a livid print on the man’s neck where his hand had been, but it barely registered in his occupied mind.

Instead, Kylo was thinking, _He’s right.  I **could** have killed him then.  I should have.  Then he could no longer hold me back._

“This is just a dream,” Dameron taunted Kylo once he regained his breath.  “Do what you will and get it over with!  Have your fun, but it won’t make any difference.”  In Poe’s words, Kylo could hear his own inner self, full of doubt and uncertainty: _No matter what I do here, it makes no difference out there in the waking universe.  I’ve failed Grandfather by letting Poe—Dameron escape, by letting the girl escape, by letting our beautiful weapon fall to pieces under my very feet.  The only thing I succeeded in doing was to kill Han Solo, and that will mean nothing if I lose.  I killed my father for nothing._

Dameron dropped his eyes, then lifted them again to glare up at Kylo through his black lashes.

_If I lose, I would have left **him** for nothing._

With a roar of frustration, Kylo leapt at Dameron and grasped a handful of the pilot’s dark, wavy hair to slam his head back on the panel against which his body rested.

“ _Shut up!_ ” Kylo screamed at him, even though he knew he was only screaming at himself.  He didn’t care.  If silencing the dream-Poe could muffle Kylo’s own self-doubt for a while, Kylo would settle for that.

Dameron winced when the back of his skull met the hard surface to which he was bound.  When he opened his eyes again, Kylo could see that the pain had made a thread of water rise along his bottom eyelids, but Dameron blinked it back.

“I _want_ to kill you,” Kylo cried, curling Poe’s dark hair around his fingers and pulling it tighter.  “I want to make you hurt.  I want to make things go wrong for _you_ instead of for me, just once!”

Dameron shouted right back at him, “This isn’t things going wrong for me?!”

“You got out of it!  You _always_ get out of it.”  Kylo brought his free hand up to grip the side of Dameron’s jaw, his pale fingers standing out in stark contrast against Poe’s darker skin.   _I can do whatever I want here, with no consequences,_ Kylo thought.  _No one to see, no one to know._

He didn’t want to kill Poe, not really—not even in a dream where it wasn’t real, wouldn’t last.  What Kylo wanted was to unburden himself of everything he’d carried inside, all the things he’d never even let himself think about, much less say to anyone.

And he wanted to make Poe Dameron listen.

“You’ve always been perfect, while everything fell apart around me.”  Kylo was no longer yelling; his voice had dropped back to its normal register, but his words were as harsh as if he’d screamed them.  “My mother sent _me_ away while you got to stay.  Why weren’t _you_ their son instead of me?”

Poe’s startled eyes jerked over his face.  “What are you talking about?  They gave you everything.  They _loved_ you, and you broke their hearts.”

Kylo leaned closer, until his long nose almost touched Poe’s, and hissed, “What about _my_ heart?  What _I_ wanted?”

“From where I am, it looks like you just _take_ what you want,” observed Poe with what was almost a sneer.  “And kill whatever you don’t.”

“There are things,” Kylo muttered, “even the Dark cannot take for itself.  Love.  Pride.”

“You _had_ that.”  Poe’s eyelids lowered even further than normal until Kylo could barely see the glitter of his dark eyes under them.  “You threw it all away.  You _chose_ to.”

Kylo’s rage crested again, and he snarled, “I never had your luck and your pretty face!  All your friends—even the droids love you—you had everything!”

“I didn’t have _you_.”  This time, Kylo was the one to start, and he drew back a few inches.  Poe was staring at him, almost _through_ him.  The pilot went on, “You threw me away, too.  You’re right, there are things no one can make theirs by force.  I couldn’t make you stay with me.”

 _This isn’t how my dreams are supposed to be,_ Kylo thought.  _Even here, I’m failing._

“Ben,” said Poe Dameron.

 _Don’t call me that,_ thought Kylo Ren, but he couldn’t say it.  All his control of the dream seemed to have slipped away.  He looked into the face of the handsome man still gripped in his hands.

“You just destroy things, don’t you, when they get in your way?  Just smash them with your light saber.”  Poe spoke slowly, as if he were tired—but then, he must be, because this dream-Poe was really just Kylo’s doubt-filled inner self again, and that self was tired of everything.  “And what you can’t destroy, you escape—you dream some other reality where you have all those things you can’t take.”

“I didn’t want to be here,” Kylo told him.  “I tried to dream something else.”

Poe’s mouth twisted in a bitter half-smile.  “So did I, Ben.”

This time, Kylo could say it: “Don’t call me that.”  The words came out in a whisper, and somehow, his head was bent over Poe’s again.  His fingers were aching from being clenched in Poe’s hair, but he didn’t want to let go.  Not _couldn’t_.  He _didn’t want to._

“This is just a dream,” Poe murmured, and Kylo could feel the pilot’s breath on his lips.  “You’ll get over it.  Just like you got over me.”

Kylo still had some control of the dream after all, because he was able to shut Poe up by kissing him.  Poe tasted like salty like sweat and a little metallic like the blood that had run from the wound on his head to the corner of his mouth.  He parted his lips under Kylo’s and lifted his head as much as his restraints and Kylo’s hold would allow, trying to kiss his captor deeper.  Kylo pressed Poe’s head back and thrust his tongue into the pilot’s mouth.  He elicited a moan from Poe that sounded just like the moans that still tormented Kylo’s memory.

When Kylo drew back, breaking the kiss, Poe looked up at him.

“I loved you, Ben,” he whispered.

Kylo did had _some_ control of the dream, for he was able to make himself wake up when he couldn’t stand to hear any more.

\--

Poe Dameron jerked awake with a choked gasp, half-sitting up in bed before he realized where he was.  He touched his temple and the side of his face.  Poe found healing scabs there, but no fresh blood.  No hand gripping his jaw.  No fingers tangled in his hair.

Next to Poe’s bunk, BB-8 whirred and gave a soft, inquisitive beep into the darkness.  Poe’s low cry must have startled him out of low-power mode.

“It’s okay, buddy,” Poe mumbled sleepily as he lay back.  He put a hand to his mouth then let it fall again as he closed his eyes.  “I was just dreaming.”

\--

To be continued


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you’re interested in the Dreamlands, check out H. P. Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle stories. Serannian is mentioned in “Celephaïs” (which tells Kuranes’s story) and _The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath_.

The next time Kylo Ren slept, he found the Dreamlands.  Yet he felt no triumph and decided the Force must be mocking him, because Poe Dameron stood beside him on the outskirts of Serannian, the city in the clouds where the sea met the sky.  Those clouds were as golden and rosy in color as the legends always claimed, and the city spires stretched before the two men to pierce the mists above.  It was like standing in a sunset.  Although the ground was solid beneath their feet, Kylo could see the ocean far off on the horizon to either side of them, where the land fell away abruptly.  They and the city rested on an island which floated not on the water but on the very air.

_Is it real?_ Kylo wondered.  _Have I truly found the Dreamlands, or have I only built them within my own mind?_   If it _was_ real, if Kylo had finally succeeded in the quest he could only pursue in his sleep, then the Poe Dameron at his side was real too. . . and Poe Dameron, artless in the Force, had achieved what had taken Kylo years to do, making his way to the Dreamlands _by accident_.

_Of course_ , Kylo thought.  Bare-faced in his dream, without the shelter of his mask, Kylo scowled into the golden haze of the city.  _Of course he can do without trying what only the most practiced dreamers can accomplish._

“Where are we?”  Poe asked the question in a tone that was low, flat, emotionless.  Trying not to provoke.

“Serannian.”  Kylo matched the timbre of Poe’s voice.  He was surprised to find that he didn’t feel angry, even at Poe for being there in the dream realm so easily.  The only thing anger might accomplish here would be to wake Kylo so that he might never find the Dreamlands again.  He decided instead to maintain a cautious neutrality and see where it led.

“What _is_ it, though?” Poe persisted.

“Serannian is a city, on an island in the sky.”  Kylo did not look at Poe and instead turned to squint out at the ribbon of green-blue ocean visible far to his right.  “We’re in the Dreamlands.”

Poe did not ask what the Dreamlands were.  Perhaps he had heard the legends too, or perhaps it didn’t matter to him.  Kylo still looked away at the ocean; then he raised his head to study the sky.  It was the color of cream at the edges, but the hue shifted at its zenith to a deep blue which seemed on the verge of darkening into midnight.  As Kylo watched, a great airship drifted toward them from over the water.  It was protected by a copper-colored hull that lay open on the left side to reveal a pale, delicate inner balloon, and two propellers on either side of the ship’s dark-windowed gondola controlled its movement.  When the airship drew came closer, Kylo caught a glint of something green within the gondola’s window; then he realized a set of emerald-hued eyes was staring down at them.  Not the eyes of something within the airship—the eyes of the airship itself.  _It was alive._

Forgetting all his pretensions for a moment, Kylo whipped his head back to look at Poe.  The other man was staring at the airship too, his dark eyes wide and gleaming with Serannian’s reflected golden light.  Poe’s gaze fell to Kylo when the craft passed directly over their heads without incident.  Their eyes met, and Poe began to laugh so hard, he could barely speak.

“I—I hope it’s decided we’re friendly!” he chuckled.  “It’s got a cannon on top.”  Kylo felt the flicker of a smile on his own face before he could stop it, and Poe saw.  Resenting the cocky look dawning in Poe’s lovely eyes, Kylo flattened his mouth and looked back at Serannian instead.

Kylo Ren’s intentions toward the city had been far from friendly, but he had never made plans for what he would do upon actually reaching the Dreamlands.  Now he was there, and he had nothing: no weapons, no army, nothing with which to conquer Serannian and kill its king.  Kylo was alone save for Poe Dameron, and he knew Poe would never agree to help him in his conquest.

With little hope that he would succeed, Kylo tried to conjure his lightsaber into his hand but found he could not.  Creating objects was an easy enough task in his usual lucid dreams, but things seemed to be different in the Dreamlands, for his bare hand remained empty.

_The Dreamlands **is** a real place, then,_ Kylo thought, _and I truly am here.  And so is he._

Kylo looked at Poe again, half expecting that Poe would have been granted a weapon just to annoy Kylo further.  But the smaller man appeared to be unarmed as he stood, feet apart, with his hands shoved in the pockets of a scuffed leather jacket.  Poe was gazing up at the spires in the heart of the city.  Sculpted from pinkish marble, they were surrounded by shorter buildings, many of those topped with domes.  This outer ring of buildings was in turn circled by the wall that enfolded Serannian.  Just outside the wall lay a moat, and on the other side of that stood Kylo and Poe.  A cobblestone bridge began almost at their feet and arched over the moat to reach an open gate in the city wall.  Even the cobblestones were beautiful, mostly cream-colored but interspersed with iridescent rocks that looked like gigantic pearls.  Everything about Serannian was light and exquisite, and Kylo hated it because it was exactly as the legends had told, and because he wanted to stay there and love the city instead of destroying it.

“I’m going in,” said Poe.

Kylo snapped his eyes from the open gate to the other man as Poe started across the bridge, as casual as if he were taking a walk back on Yavin IV, back when they were younger and in love with each other.  How _could_ he?  Kylo seethed.

Poe stopped halfway across the bridge, looked back at Kylo, and asked, “You coming?”

\--

They wandered Serannian in silence.  Kylo tried to ignore Poe and instead studied everything with a keen eye and even sharper mind, hoping to gain some insight on the heavenly city’s weaknesses.  Subtle experiments showed him that the Force held no sway there in the Dreamlands, and Kylo was shaken to the core though he gave no outward sign of it.  In Serannian, he had no telekinesis, no telepathy, no strength save for that of an ordinary man.

Meanwhile, the ordinary man at Kylo’s side was enjoying himself.  Poe seemed to admire Serannian’s architecture the most, especially how the pink turrets at the city’s center had been constructed so as to complement the shining clouds gathered about them.  But he also smiled at every being they encountered, a mix of races and species from all over the physical galaxy as well as creatures unlike any Kylo had seen before.  Nearly everyone smiled back at Poe, or gave whatever gesture was the equivalent for their anatomical structure.  Just as he always had, Kylo felt ignored beside his companion, even as he himself tried to ignore Poe.

Twilight was long in Serannian, and shadows crept up the towers very slowly.  Yet night did eventually descend, and the last of the golden sunrays tipped the spires, lit the clouds with flame, and disappeared.  As the natural light faded, paper lanterns came to life instead.  They were peach and yellow and pink, some the kind that floated up into the air borne by their flames’ heat, others spherical shades that hung over candles.  A few of the brightest stars and a crescent moon hung in the patches of black sky Kylo could glimpse between the buildings when he looked up.

He was staring up at that moon when Poe touched his elbow.  Kylo felt the touch all through his body before he looked down at the smaller man beside him.  They stood near the terrace of what might be an outdoor tavern or cantina, this patio dotted with round tables lit by more lanterns.  A few beings of various species sat nearby, clustered around one such table and watching the two men.

“They asked us to join them,” Poe murmured.

“Why?” asked Kylo, his voice edged with scorn.

“Trying to be nice.”  Poe narrowed his eyes at Kylo as he went on, “Something you wouldn’t understand.  They said they could tell we were travelers.  The one across the table knows stories about this place.”

In spite of himself, Kylo was tempted.  The storyteller, a sort of tree-like being, looked very old, and perhaps Kylo really could learn more about Serannian from him.  Poe, still watching Kylo, saw his hesitation and smiled.  The smile transformed Poe’s handsome face and made him look young and carefree, the way he’d been when Kylo first knew him.

“Come on.”  He grasped Kylo’s arm and pulled him in to the table.  Kylo wondered at how kind Poe was to him. . . but then, he was Poe Dameron, and Poe Dameron was perfect.  Perfect enough to strike a truce while they were there on neutral ground, while Kylo would have chosen to continue his war against everything and everyone.

Poe introduced them to the creatures gathered around the table, calling Kylo “Ben.”  Kylo did not correct him in front of the others because they were looking at him with open, friendly expressions, and he thought that would change if he contradicted Poe.  Most of the creatures resembled vegetable life, and some of them were very young; one was a mere sprout who sat right on the table with four stumpy legs tucked under her bulb-shaped form as she gazed up at Kylo with wide, adoring brown eyes so openly innocent, they embarrassed him.

The storyteller, though, was ancient and massive: if Kylo and Poe had stood on either side of him and reached around his trunk, their hands could not have met.  He had an intricate system of roots which trailed into shallow bowls of liquid spread around his chair.  Although he had a mouth, he only spoke through that and drank through his roots instead.  The sprout had a glass with a straw, however, and soon a server brought glasses for Kylo and Poe as well.

“What is this?” Kylo asked, tilting his head to eye the clear, green-tinted liquid.  No one answered him, and Poe shrugged and drank from his glass.  Kylo watched and, when Poe didn’t fall over poisoned, said, “You’re still as reckless as ever.”

“And you’re as suspicious as ever,” Poe told him, “and just as rude, too.  Drink it.  It tastes good.”  Kylo glared at him, but Poe was right about the flavor of the drink.  It was sweet yet not overly so, and Kylo thought it might only be infused water.

“What story do you wish to hear?” the old tree-creature asked them.

Kylo and Poe looked at one another; then Poe said, “You choose, Ben.”

“Tell us about King Kuranes,” Kylo told the storyteller.  “Please.”

So the storyteller related how a mortal man from the waking universe found his way to the Dreamlands and created in his dreams Serannian and its sister-city of Celephaïs, which was located somewhere on land far below them.  The mortal had given up his life in the physical realm to live forever in the Dreamlands, where he took the name of Kuranes and became the ageless king of the cities he had dreamed into being.

“He gave up everything so he could dream forever,” murmured Poe.

“Maybe he had nothing left,” replied Kylo, “except his dreams.  It isn’t much of a sacrifice, in that case.”

“But to _die_.”  Poe shifted in his chair to look at Kylo beside him.  “Would _you_?  You want power badly enough to throw everything else away for it—would you throw your own life away too, if you could have that power in your dreams?”  When Kylo didn’t answer, Poe scowled at him and turned away again.  The others at the table politely ignored the argument, but after a moment, the sprout toddled over to Kylo and sat beside his arm, glaring at Poe over Kylo’s hands.  Kylo felt oddly vindicated.

They listened to the storyteller and a few of the others for what must have been hours, until the crescent moon had set.  The plant beings described the dream-races who lived in other parts of the realm: salientian creatures who dwelt on the Dreamlands’ moon and served a deity whom the storyteller called only the “Crawling Chaos”; Hastur, the King in Yellow and priest of the Chaos who presided over the wastes; canid ghouls whose leader had once lived in the physical universe until he, like King Kuranes, learned the secret of passing over; the faceless, winged night-gaunts who flitted about the Underworld, capturing unwary travelers only to tickle them if they struggled.  

At this last tale, Poe laughed until he nearly cried, and when questioned, blurted out that he had imagined Kylo in a night-gaunt’s clutches.  Kylo did not find the idea nearly as amusing, but he let Poe tease him, because he’d forgotten how beautiful Poe was when he laughed.  The sprout giggled too and nudged Kylo’s hand until he gave in and petted the two broad leaves growing from the top of the bulb that served her as both head and body.  A fine down covered her soft leaves, and Kylo kept stroking them absently, even after he saw Poe watching him with a faint smile.

Eventually, Kylo prodded their hosts into telling them more about Serannian itself.  Once, it seemed, the Crawling Chaos had set his sights on destroying it—had, in fact succeeded but was opposed by a group of rebels who fought and drove him away.  They called upon all the dreamers of the physical universe, and together they dreamed Serannian back, even more beautiful than before.  Some of the creatures who fought the Chaos still lived outside the city in the forests on the outer edges of the floating island, to protect Serannian should the Chaos ever return.  Kylo and Poe looked at one another, and Kylo thought of the living airship who had cast his emerald eye upon them.  With that, Kylo gave up all hope of conquering Serannian.

_Here, what is destroyed will only be dreamt back to life,_ he thought, and he understood why Kuranes and the ghoul leader had let their bodies die in the physical universe to live forever in the Dreamlands instead.  What would he, Kylo, rebuild if he had only to dream it?

Nothing, he decided.  To rebuild, to restore, was to go backward.  Kylo wanted only to go forward: to destroy and to build anew.

_But I can do enough of that in the waking universe,_ Kylo decided, gazing at the old storyteller through what felt like a dark veil of exhaustion.  _Let them keep this place, for the old and the dreaming and the dead._

When Kylo looked at Poe again, the eyes that often seemed half-closed were shut completely, dark lashes resting on his cheeks.  The sprout had fallen asleep under Kylo’s hand, which now lay atop her leaves with his fingers draped over her round side

“You are both very tired,” the storyteller observed.  “Come in and rest.”

Poe opened his eyes with visible effort and muttered, “But. . . how?  How can I be sleepy in a dream?”

“Haven’t you ever had a dream within a dream before?” Kylo murmured.  “Where you struggle to wake, but when you do, it’s only into another dream?”  Poe nodded, and Kylo told him, “Then you’ve slept in dreams before now.”

“We don’t have any money,” Poe told the storyteller, “or whatever you use here.”

“You are our guests,” the tree-creature replied.  “You are welcome here.”

The serving girl who had brought their drinks came to lead them inside.  When Kylo stood and lifted his hand from his new companion’s leaves, she stirred and grasped at his sleeve with the claws on her front feet.

“Ben,” she squeaked drowsily, “no leave.”

Kylo flushed and mumbled, “I need to rest. . . and so do you.”  He stroked one of her leaves with his fingertips.  “I’ll see you again.”  He knew that was likely a lie, but the sprout believed him.  She nuzzled his hand and mumbled a sleepy goodnight.  Kylo could feel Poe’s eyes on him as he turned away from her, but Kylo refused to look back at him.

The server took Kylo and Poe inside to what seemed to be an inn adjoining the tavern, then took them upstairs to a room.  As he climbed the creaking wooden steps in their narrow staircase, following Poe who followed the serving girl, Kylo pondered the words, “You are welcome here.”  When had he last been welcome anywhere, not because he could buy or force his way in, not because he was Kylo Ren—but only for his own sake?  Who, before he met the citizens of Serannian, had ever accepted him only for who he was?

_Poe did, once,_ Kylo thought, and the realization stopped him short and stranded him on the staircase as the other two went on up.  _He accepted me as easily as that little plant creature did this evening.  He accepted me when I was nothing—he loved me then.  And now that I finally matter, now I’m nothing to **him**.  I could rule the entire galaxy, and it wouldn’t matter here in the Dreamlands, and it wouldn’t matter to Poe.  I’ll never again be anything but someone for him to hate, here or anywhere else._

Kylo resumed his climb and plodded up the stairs.  When he caught up to the others, the serving girl was opening the door to a small room with two beds and a window opening out onto the city.  After she bid them goodnight and left them there, Kylo went to the window, but Poe collapsed on one of the beds, face up and arms spread.

“I wish I could sleep in one of those towers at the center of the city,” Poe breathed.  “Right up at the top, looking down on everything.  That would be amazing.”  Kylo remained at the window with his back to Poe, but even so, and even without the Force, he knew Poe had turned his head to watch him.

“How?  _How?_ ” Kylo muttered as he gripped the windowsill, which was fashioned from a smooth, blond wood.  He stared up at the patch of sky he could see past the spires and turrets of Serannian’s buildings.  In that sky, the stars were fading; it was almost dawn.

“How what?” Poe asked around a yawn.

“How did you get here, to Serannian—to the Dreamlands?  I’ve tried to find this place for _years_ and couldn’t, but you. . . .”

“I followed you.”  Kylo spun to face him, but Poe’s eyes were closed again.  He mumbled, “I was thinking about you. . . when I fell asleep.  And I found you, here.”

“You were thinking about me.  _Why?_ ” Kylo demanded.

“Wondering if I would dream about you again.”

“So we dreamed the same dream,” Kylo whispered.  “I thought. . . I thought it wasn’t real.”  Silently, he added, _I didn’t want it to be real._   Poe sat up again and opened his eyes, ringed with dark circles of exhaustion.

“So did I,” Poe said, “until I saw you here, outside the city.  And then I knew, it was real.”  He shrugged out of his jacket and tossed it across the foot of the bed, then started untying his boots.  He glanced up at Kylo again, taking in his black cloak.  “You’re not sleeping in that, are you?”

Kylo looked away from Poe and mechanically unfastened his cloak, letting it fall to the floor.  As he lowered himself to sit on the edge of the second bed, Poe lay down on top of the bedclothes, on his back but with his face turned away from Kylo.  Kylo removed his own boots and lay down as well, his back to Poe and his eyes focused on the wall beside his bed.  As Kylo’s eyes finally dropped closed, the young plant-creature’s plea echoed through his brain.

_Ben. . . don’t leave._

As Kylo fell asleep, his last thought was that once, Poe had said that to him too.

\--

To be continued


	3. Chapter 3

So Kylo slept there within his sleep, and within the Dreamlands, he dreamed.

He was floating upright above Serannian, but the city appeared decimated—no longer a rosy, sunlit paradise but now a ruin.  The towers and spires had all toppled and lay in piles of rubble far below his feet.  A dank, greenish-grey fog was rolling in, seeping through the once-golden clouds; it crawled and crept, like something alive.

_The Crawling Chaos,_ Kylo thought.  He had heard the name before, but he couldn’t remember where. _It’s destroyed the city—and now it’s coming for me._

But then, he realized that he was dreaming.  He was dreaming the past, about how the Chaos had attacked the city, and a handful of rebels had opposed it.

_It’s not real,_ Kylo told himself, _only a dream.  Like I’m watching a hologram of it—or like I’m the hologram, projected in the middle of a war._   The thought brought no comfort because it was all too familiar, and when Kylo turned in the air to look behind him, he already knew what he would see: a few rebels, gathered together in a seemingly hopeless stand against the enemy.

They had come in airships, just eight of them.  Only one was of an impressive size, and it had an armored hull that might offer at least some defense in battle.  (Like the name of the Crawling Chaos, the ship was familiar to Kylo, but he couldn’t have said why.)  The others were mere soft-sided blimps, little more than pleasure-craft.  As Kylo looked back at them and the fog began to climb through the empty air over the fallen city, he was suddenly aware that Poe was aboard one of the airships, somewhere among the rebels preparing to make their hopeless last stand.

_I have to protect him._   The thought made no sense coupled with Kylo’s knowledge that the dream wasn’t real, yet the conviction filled him: he had to shield Poe Dameron from whatever terrible thing approached them on the bitter fog.

_Why?_ Kylo asked of himself, of his subconscious which must be directing his dream. _Why can’t I let him die?_   And because it _was_ just a dream, he didn’t suppress the answer that came to him: _Because I love him, still._

Kylo turned back to the fog, but it had become more than that.  Something rose from it, something that same sickening grey-green color.  Young as he was, Kylo had seen innumerable species and races of creatures in his lifetime, but none of them had been anything like what gathered itself before him now.  It seemed a mass of tentacles and mouths and eyes, but at the same time, they were _nothing_ like tentacles or mouths or eyes, not at all.  The Crawling Chaos was like a shapeshifter who hadn’t quite mastered his art, an actor in an ill-fitting costume. . . but its true form, the body the costume concealed, was something that Kylo knew he could never comprehend.

_If I saw its true face, it would break me,_ he thought _.  My mind would shatter, because it isn’t anything from this galaxy.  It isn’t anything from this **universe** , and it doesn’t belong here, not even in this universe’s dreams.  Because it cannot possess this realm, it wants to tear it apart, to annihilate the Dreamlands—and it’s starting with Serannian._

“You just destroy things, don’t you, when they get in your way?” Kylo whispered, the same words Poe had spoken to him in that other dream.  And then Kylo knew why he was dreaming Serannian’s demise, because as he looked into the monstrosity that was the Crawling Chaos, Kylo Ren saw himself.

As soon as Kylo understood this, the squirming mass of flesh before him began to reshape itself into something else.  In only a few seconds, it had become a human man, a bit taller than Kylo and much thinner, with copper-colored skin, a fringe of straight black hair that reached to his pointed chin, and dark eyes like starry voids.  His wide mouth smiled, and the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled with amusement, as if he laughed at a terrible private joke.  He wore a toga-like garment that first appeared white, then seemed to shimmer in a spectrum of a thousand colors, then again became the purest white.

He was handsome, beautiful even, yet he repulsed Kylo—not least because taken individually, his features recalled Poe’s.  The skin, the hair, the eyes, all the same color as Poe’s. . . but when combined into the man, he was somehow Poe’s complete opposite.

“Do you know me, Kylo Ren?” the smiling man said.

“You are the Crawling Chaos,” answered Kylo.

The man shrugged.  “Among other things.  But another name for me is Nyarlathotep.  Call me that.”

“How do _you_ know _me_?” Kylo challenged him, although he told himself, _He knows me because he’s just a projection of myself.  This is just a dream._

“I know everyone,” Nyarlathotep told him, still smiling.  “But I know you, especially.  It’s amusing that you think we are anything alike, you and I.  You’re wrong—I’m not like you at all.  You’re trying to find parallels between us because you want to make sense of this dream. . . and perhaps because it’s the only way you can comprehend me.  You compare me to yourself, or to _him_ —”  He cast his black, narrow eyes toward the armored airship behind Kylo, where Poe must be.  “—but really, I am nothing like anything you know.”

“What do you want?” Kylo murmured, and Nyarlathotep’s smile grew.

“Nothing,” he said.

_He means it literally,_ Kylo understood. _Not that he doesn’t want anything—that he wants **nothing**.  He wants Serannian to become nothing._

He whispered, “Why?”

“Why not?” returned Nyarlathotep.  “Do you want to try to stop me?  You’re too late to save this pretty little island in the sky.”

Kylo thought, _No, I’m not, because I know what will happen.  It will be restored, the dreamers of the universe will dream it back._

“But do you want to save your pretty little lover?” Nyarlathotep went on.  “Would you like to try?”

“He isn’t—” Kylo began, then stopped.  Anger began to filter through him, anger at Nyarlathotep’s arrogance and amusement, and Kylo welcomed it.  Anger was familiar territory.  Anger led to the Dark, and the Dark led to. . . .

_The Force._   He could feel it inside him. _I have it, here.  I can use it against him._

Nyarlathotep lifted his arm and spread his long fingers in a languid gesture.

“I’m going to destroy him,” he commented.  “Isn’t that what one should do with rebels?  I won’t spare him the way you did.”

Kylo raised his own hand and felt the Force swell around him, not as a weapon to use against Nyarlathotep, but as a shield to protect from him.  Kylo built that shield upon the foundation of his wrath, and imagined that it encircled both himself and the small fleet of airships—although it wasn’t the airships he cared about, but the man he knew one of them carried.

Nyarlathotep’s smile widened.  His fingers contracted, then flicked outward, and tendrils of the sickening fog stretched from their tips.  The tendrils snaked forward, if such a quick, almost instantaneous, motion could be called “snaking.”  The fog spread over the orb of the Force that surrounded Kylo, engulfing it but not penetrating to touch Kylo inside.

But the orb _only_ surrounded Kylo, and try as he might, he could not summon the power or the strength to make it grow.  He spun in horror to see the fog sprawling, _crawling_ toward the airships.

“No!” Kylo shouted, but the fog was as mindless as Nyarlathotep was heedless of his cry.  It washed over the ships, and where the green-grey mist touched them, they dissolved like salt into water.  Kylo’s voice failed him, and his eyes fixed on the single armored zeppelin.  The fog reached it last, but the armor did nothing to protect the ship beneath.  Two emerald-colored lights glowed from the gondola beneath it as the fog obscured the craft’s nose.  To Kylo, those lights looked like terrified eyes staring at their own approaching death.  Then the fog obscured them, and by the time it had dissipated, every one of the airships was gone.

Kylo stared into the void where they had been.  Now there was only the dark night sky of the Dreamlands, surrounding the barren floating island where Serannian had once lain.  Finally, Kylo turned back to look at Nyarlathotep.  Kylo couldn’t feel any of his rage now, only an abyssal emptiness far blacker than the Dreamlands’ sky or even than the eyes of Nyarlathotep.

“You can’t save him,” said Nyarlathotep, not smiling now but with amusement still twinkling at the corners of his eyes.  “Not without my assistance.”

“This isn’t real,” Kylo muttered in a voice that sounded flat and dead even to his own ears.  “It’s just a dream.”

“But is there any difference between the real and the dream?” Nyarlathotep asked him.  He took a step forward in the empty air, and Kylo did not draw back.

“You cannot oppose me,” continued Nyarlathotep.  “You believe that order is stronger than chaos, do you not?  But you’re wrong—eventually, things fall apart.  _Everything_ falls apart.  Your universe rose from chaos long ago, and into chaos it will someday descend.  Chaos will consume order, always—and it will consume _your_ Order too.”

“Poe isn’t dead,” Kylo insisted.  In the face of Nyarlathotep’s insidious words, it was the only fact Kylo could argue, for he knew that Nyarlathotep wasn’t lying.

“He is,” said Nyarlathotep, “unless you ask me to save him.”

“I will never ask anything of you,” growled Kylo.

Nyarlathotep smiled once more, and he said, “We will see.”

\--

Kylo awoke in his room in Serannian with a shout, sitting up in bed and grappling with nothing.  As soon as he opened his eyes, he remembered where he was and that he was still dreaming.  Nyarlathotep, his decimation of Serannian and the airships and Poe, had been a dream within his dream.

Strong yellow light streamed in through the window overlooking the city.  It was morning, and Poe’s bed was empty.  Panic gripped Kylo.  Was Poe dead, after all?  Or had Poe awakened— _really_ awakened, into the physical universe?  Or had he simply abandoned Kylo and gone off into the Dreamlands on his own?

Then the door to their room opened, and Poe came in balancing a tray with a teapot and cups on one outstretched arm as he manipulated the door latch with his other hand.  He looked at Kylo, and at the relief palpable on Kylo’s face, and smiled.

“You didn’t think I’d leave you here, did you?” Poe asked.  He came into the room, letting the door swing shut behind him.  Kylo’s relief collapsed into humiliation, and he looked away.

“Why not?” he muttered.

Poe set the tray down on the nightstand between their beds, then poured what did appear to be tea of some sort into the cups.  Unlike what they’d drunk the night before, the liquid was hot.

“ _You_ wouldn’t have left _me_ ,” Poe said, setting the teapot down again.

“I left you before.”  Still, Kylo took the cup Poe handed him.  He blew across its top, disturbing the coiling steam and pushing it out past the rim of the cup to drift above his bedsheets.  Kylo thought of the fog of Nyarlathotep crawling in over Serannian, and he shuddered.

“Are you all right?”  The concern in Poe’s voice only heightened the sick feeling in Kylo’s chest, and he nodded without looking at the other man.

“Anyway, yes, you left me before,” said Poe.  He had picked up the other cup but hadn’t drunk from it yet.  When Kylo finally glanced up at him, Poe was watching him.  “The last two times I saw you, you left me in restraints, if I remember correctly.  But at least you kissed me goodbye the other night—so I know you wouldn’t leave me here, because you haven’t kissed me yet.”

Kylo put as much force as he could muster into the glare he directed at Poe, but the other man just continued to gaze down at him, mild and insouciant.  After a moment, Poe took a sip from his teacup.

“I’m not going to kiss you.”  Kylo swallowed some of his tea; it was sweet, sweeter than the previous night’s drink, although he hadn’t seen Poe add anything to it.  _Far different from the bitterness I drank all those nights in the past, trying to find this place,_ Kylo thought _.  The bitter tea never let me reach Serannian—I didn’t even need that tea.  All I needed was to have him with me._

Poe sat down on Kylo’s bed, on the edge beside where Kylo hunched in the middle.  Poe cradled his cup in his hands—smaller hands than Kylo’s, their skin dark in contrast to the white porcelain vessel he held so carefully.  Kylo realized he wasn’t wearing his leather jacket now, and his compact, muscular arms were bare.  When Kylo tore his eyes from them, he noticed the jacket draped across the foot of Poe’s bed.  In his panic, Kylo hadn’t seen it when he awoke.  Otherwise, he would have known Poe hadn’t abandoned him, for of course Poe wouldn’t have left the jacket behind.

“Are you hungry?” Poe asked him, so close to him their arms nearly touched.  “I’m not.  Not even thirsty really, but when I went wandering around downstairs, they had the tea ready for us.”

“I’m not hungry,” Kylo muttered.  “I suppose we don’t need food here.”  He looked down at his cup, which had stopped steaming as the tea cooled.  He struggled for something neutral to say, just to make conversation.  After his dream, he wanted to talk to Poe about something, anything to reassure himself.

Finally, he asked, “Why did you go wandering?”  He turned his head to look at Poe as he spoke.  Poe looked back at him, dark eyes ( _dark like starry voids_ ) widening a bit in surprise.

“Well. . . I’ve been awake for a while now, since the sun started coming up.  I got bored waiting for you to wake up, so I went to see what was going on.”  Poe kept watching Kylo a moment, as if he expected some kind of response, but then he turned back to his tea.

After they sat in silence for a moment, Poe mused, “I was thinking about what one of them said last night, that every dreamer’s Dreamlands is a little different.  So I wonder, how we do know if you and I are seeing the same things here?”

“I don’t think we’ve ever seen the same things.”  Kylo stared down into his cup to keep from staring at Poe.  The tea was honey-colored.  “What does your tea look like?”

“Hunh?  Oh.”  Poe looked.  “It’s yellow.  Looks like honey, but thin.  Like tea.”

“That’s what I see too,” Kylo told him.

“But,” Poe persisted, growing more animated as he pursued the matter, “what if words don’t mean the same to you here as they do to me?  Like I say ‘honey’ but while I’m thinking of something yellow, you’re thinking of something that’s really. . . I don’t know, green maybe.”

Kylo cut his eyes in Poe’s direction.  “Why do I have to be the one who’s wrong?”

“But—but it’s not _wrong_!”  Poe turned to face him with a look of excitement.  “For you, maybe honey _is_ green.  For me, it’s yellow.  It’s just as true for both of us, but our realities are different!”  He exasperated Kylo, but in a familiar, almost comforting way. . . the way he had when they had first known each other and Kylo had watched him from afar, wanting to learn more about him.

“Poe, you’re a terrible philosopher,” Kylo sighed.  “Perhaps we _do_ see this place differently from one another, but. . . it doesn’t matter.  The differences aren’t important.”

“And why aren’t they important?”  Poe was calmer now, smiling at him.

“Because. . . .”  Kylo almost said, “Because this is just a dream,” but that wasn’t true.

_Serannian is a place as real as any in the waking universe, and Poe is here with me,_ Kylo thought.  _No matter where in the galaxy our physical bodies are, our souls are together right now.  It’s not just a dream.  It’s not “just” anything._

Kylo answered, “Because the differences aren’t great enough to keep us from communicating with each other.”  Poe kept smiling, but his smile took on a proud quality, as if he had proven some great theory of his to be correct.  He didn’t explain, though, only tilted back his head and drained his teacup.

“We could be here in the Dreamlands for ages,” he murmured as he got up from the bed and set his cup back on the tray.  “Time is different here.  Years can go by here for every night we sleep in the real—the other universe.”

“Yes,” said Kylo.  He leaned over to put his teacup down, unable to finish drinking the tea which had grown cold.  He looked up at Poe, who was still facing the wall behind the beds.  Kylo gazed at his profile—forehead, nose, lips—and wished that Poe would sit down beside him again.  When Poe turned back to face him, Kylo looked away.

“You knew about this place for years?” Poe asked.  When Kylo nodded, his face still turned away, Poe murmured, “No wonder you were trying to get here.  I’ve never seen any place so beautiful before.  I know I have to wake up, eventually, but I hope we can come back here someday.”

_We,_ thought Kylo.  _He said “we,” us coming back together. . . someday._ There were a thousand reasons why that “someday” may not come.  Poe might be killed.  _Kylo_ might be killed.  One of them might not be able to find his way back to the Dreamlands.  One of them might not _want_ to.

_After I wake up,_ Kylo knew, _I might never see him again, here or anywhere else._

“Ben?  Will _you_ try to come back?” Poe was asking him.

Kylo blinked back the ache he felt pressing behind his eyes and said, “Yes.”  Out of the corner of his eye, Kylo saw Poe nod; then the smaller man picked up his jacket and pulled it on.

“Aren’t you ever getting out of bed?” Poe asked as he sat to put his shoes back on.  “We should go see more, while we can.  That old guy last night said that ships can sail right up the clouds to the harbor here!  We could get on a boat and go anywhere in the Dreamlands.”

His mind had been so fixated on conquering Serannian, Kylo hadn’t thought about other places in the Dreamlands he might see.  There was Celephaïs where King Kuranes dwelt when not in Serannian; the great port city Dylath-Leen; the fantastic castle of Kadath.

And there was Poe Dameron, looking at him expectantly, and Kylo didn’t care where he went as long as Poe was beside him, because he kept seeing Nyarlathotep’s power dissolving Poe into nothingness.  And beyond that, he kept hearing Poe say, “I loved you, Ben.”  Kylo couldn’t remember why he hadn’t kept on letting Poe love him, the way he had back when Ben Solo still walked with the Light.

Poe hadn’t really changed since then, but Ben had, and now Kylo was changed again by the dream city floating where the sea meets the sky.

_But the change is ephemeral,_ Kylo told himself, _and when I awake, I will remember who I am._

“Ben?” prompted Poe.  “Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know,” Kylo muttered.

Poe grinned at him.  “Want to go to the Underworld and meet the night-gaunts?”

“ _No_.”  Kylo got up and went to the window, where he could see the spires at the center of the city stretching above the other buildings.  Their cloud raiment still clung to them, but now they seemed edged in bluish-white light rather than gold: the light of noon rather than sunset.  He couldn’t even see the top of the tallest tower; it disappeared into the clouds.

“I want to go _there_ ,” Kylo murmured.

“Where?”  Poe came up behind him to look out the window past his shoulder.

“The middle of the city, where that tall tower is.  That must be Kuranes’s palace.”

“You’re not gonna try to destroy it, are you?” Poe asked mildly.  “That blimp thing with the cannon might shoot you.  The storyteller said they were still guarding the city, remember?”

_The airship,_ Kylo suddenly recalled.  _The one with the armor that I saw in my dream of Nyarlathotep. . . it was the same one we saw when we arrived here, the one that was alive._   The thought of his dream—the airship disintegrating under Nyarlathotep’s power, disintegrating with Poe aboard—made Kylo flinch.

Poe saw his shudder and demanded, “You _were_ thinking about destroying it, weren’t you?”

“No,” Kylo retorted.  He looked over his shoulder and down, at Poe.  Poe’s eyes were skeptical as they looked back, and Kylo couldn’t lie to him.  It had always been difficult for him to lie to Poe.

“I wanted to conquer it,” Kylo muttered as he looked away from Poe and back out at the city.  “All of those years I tried to find Serannian, it was because I wanted to overthrow Kuranes.  But I never could find my way here, and now that I’ve finally reached the Dreamlands. . . it isn’t worth the effort.”

“You mean you wouldn’t be able to succeed.”  Despite lacking any control of the Force and the telepathy it offered, Poe still had his old annoying ability to see right through Kylo.  “If that—that chaos thing, a _deity_ couldn’t do it, you certainly can’t.  So why do you want to go the palace _now_?”

“If you know me so well, _you_ tell _me_ ,” Kylo snapped.  He leaned his forehead against the cold glass windowpane and closed his eyes with a sigh when Poe started to laugh.

“Stop trying to be so disagreeable, Ben!” chided Poe.  He paused; then Kylo felt a touch on his shoulder.  _His_ touch, Poe’s small hand resting there, warm and familiar.  Kylo’s breath came faster and raised a mist on the windowpane.

Then Poe murmured, “Fine, I’ll tell you why you want to go to the palace.  You want to see it up close, just because it’s a palace, a beautiful one.  The clouds are nice.  Maybe it reminds you of some place you’ve been in the waking universe, a place where you were happy.  And you want to see it because you can’t have it.  For once, you’ve decided to leave something you can’t have alone instead of breaking it, and you want to know what that feels like.”

He was right, about some of it anyway, and Kylo straightened up with his forehead burning cool where the glass had touched it.  Poe let his hand drop.

“Do you want me to come with you?” Poe asked.

“Do whatever you want.”  Kylo turned away from the window and from Poe to put his cloak back on, then went to the door of their room.  Poe hadn’t moved, and when Kylo felt compelled to look back at him, the smaller man was still standing by the window, arms folded, watching him.

“I’m not coming unless you say you want me to,” Poe told him.  Poe was being childish, Kylo thought, but overriding the thought was panic, the fear of being left alone—no, it was worse than that.  It was the fear of losing Poe all over again.

Something in Kylo made him loath to admit that he wanted, _needed_ Poe with him, even while something else argued that needing Poe Dameron couldn’t be so bad, not here anyway.  In Serannian, Poe was no longer his enemy; he was the only thing familiar and safe, the only thing Kylo had left.  The only thing he still loved.

“Fine, I want you to come with me,” Kylo muttered.  Poe smiled, and it lit up his whole face: his eyes, his mouth, even his olive-toned skin.

“Okay then!” Poe replied cheerfully.  “Let’s go!”

\--

To be continued


	4. Chapter 4

When Kylo and Poe went downstairs to the tavern, empty at that time of day, Kylo’s friend—the little plant-creature—was waiting for him.

“Ben!” she chirped and hopped from the floor to a chair, and from that to a tabletop so that she could look up into his face.

“Hey, don’t I get a hello too?” Poe chuckled, and the sprout cast him a disdainful look.

“Sorry first,” she said, then jumped abruptly from the table right at Kylo’s chest, so that he had to catch her in his arms to keep her from careening into him.

“Sorry?  Say I’m sorry for what?”  Poe was nearly overcome with amusement at seeing the small creature’s adoration of Kylo.

“Mean to Ben,” the sprout muttered, and snuggled against Kylo’s cloak.  Poe’s laughter evaporated, and he looked up at Kylo solemnly.

After a beat, Poe said, “I’m sorry I was mean to you.  Ben.”

Kylo looked away and muttered, “Don’t.”  The young plant creature missed the undercurrent of emotion running through the exchange, and she wriggled out of Kylo’s arms to jump back down on the table.

“Hello, Poe!” she cried.  Poe’s smile returned, though weaker than before, and he patted her broad leaves before they bid her farewell and set out for the castle at the heart of the city.

Kylo and Poe walked to the center of Serannian without needing to ask anyone for directions: the spire of Kuranes’s cloudy castle was always visible above the other buildings, and all the streets ran toward it like spokes on a wheel.  The Dreamlands’ sun hung overhead for what seemed a mere instant then began sliding down the sky on its way to another evening that would stretch into forever.

 _A forever for everyone but me,_ Kylo thought, _and him.  We have to wake up eventually._

As they neared the palace, the buildings around them reached taller and taller, round domes lengthening into first steeples, then spires, until Kylo and Poe finally came to the end of the street they trod.  Every street in the city ended there upon a wide road that circled the castle.  They stopped in front of an arched gate leading into the palace gardens.  Poe tilted his head back at a ninety-degree angle, looking up and up at the single turret disappearing into a nest of cloud.

“ _That’s_ where I want to sleep,” he declared, “at the very top.  Like sleeping and flying at the same time.”

“And you imply that _I_ have delusions of grandeur,” Kylo said.  Poe turned his head to look at him with it still tilted back.

“You’re trying to make a joke, aren’t you?”  He smiled at Kylo, and he looked so silly with his head like that, Kylo smiled too.  Poe’s eyes softened from glittering to gleaming when he saw Kylo’s smile.  He turned his gaze back to the castle then lifted his head slowly.

“Ow.”  Poe rubbed the back of his neck with his hand.  “If I can get sleepy in a dream, I guess I can wrench my neck too.”  He took a step toward the gate before stopping again and looking back at Kylo.  “Do you want to go inside?  _Can_ we go inside?”

“I don’t know—” Kylo began.

“You can.”  The voice, a girl’s voice, came from behind them.  They turned to look, and she was standing where Kylo knew no one had been as they approached the castle: a girl who looked younger than either of them—she might have been out of adolescence, but only barely—with hair the color of the marble palace.  It fell just past her shoulders in soft waves which shone silvery-pink in the afternoon sunlight.  She was very pretty.

“We can go in?” Poe clarified.  The girl nodded.

“If you want to.  King Kuranes is here, so it’s open.  Anyone can come and go.”

Kylo turned back to look at the castle and muttered, “He isn’t afraid the Crawling Chaos might return?  Or that someone else might attack?”

“Don’t even think about it, Ben,” Poe teased him.  Kylo glared at him then craned his neck to look over his shoulder at the girl.  She was looking down now, lips pursed in an unhappy bow shape as she smoothed with her hands the cream-colored sundress she wore.  It was loose on her body, but even when she pressed it down, her figure was boyish.  Maybe she was even younger than Kylo had assumed.

“Nyarlathotep—the Crawling Chaos—will not return here,” she finally said as she raised her eyes to them once more—wide eyes with lavender irises, a color that made Kylo think of flowers.  The girl didn’t even address the notion that someone else might dare to attempt what Nyarlathotep had failed to do.

“Shall we go in?” Poe asked Kylo.

“I can escort you,” added the girl.  “Kuranes is my friend, and I can show you the palace.”  Kylo didn’t want her with them, but he could tell Poe wanted to see the palace, maybe to ascend the turret where Kuranes slept like he was flying.

“All right,” Kylo said, and his answer made Poe smile again before the pilot turned back to the girl.

“I’m Poe,” he told her, “and this is Ben.  Who are you?”

“My name is Emily.”  She started to walk toward the castle, passing between them and gesturing for them to follow her.  She was barefoot, but the soles of her pink feet looked clean.

“Do you live here?  In Serannian, I mean?” Poe asked as he went after her.  Kylo followed him, glaring at the back of the girl’s head.

“Sometimes,” said Emily.  _How is a girl that young a friend of the king?_ Kylo wondered, full of suspicion.  _And how does she know Nyarlathotep’s name?_   Those thoughts melted into others: _I can’t feel the Force here.  If there is danger, I have no way to protect him._   Again he remembered Nyarlathotep’s fog obscuring the airship and taking Poe away from him.

Kuranes did not look like what Kylo expected.  Emily led them to him, up a winding staircase in the center of the palace’s single turret; one story up, she turned off of the stairs through a doorway, into the king’s throne room.  It too was not what Kylo had expected: bookish rather than palatial, like a library of the ancient kind of books, ones printed on paper or fabric or vellum and stored on shelves.  Kuranes sat—no, _curled_ in a wing chair upholstered in olive-green velvet, with a large book open on his lap.  He wore no crown or robe, just a dressing gown, and he looked to be about the age of Kylo’s uncle.

“King Kuranes?” Emily asked as they stood in the doorway of the small library without their host noticing them.  The man looked up from his book, and for a second, Kylo saw a hunted look in his light grey eyes.  Wrinkles creased the skin around them but crinkled into smile lines when Kuranes recognized Emily.  Kuranes pushed his thinning hair, probably once black but now streaked with grey, back behind his shoulders and set the book aside on an end table.

“Emily,” he said; then his eyes moved to glance at Poe to her left and Kylo to her right.  They fixed on Kylo, and further wrinkles formed on Kuranes’s brow, giving Kylo the disconcerting feeling that Kuranes, like Nyarlathotep, already knew him.

“These dreamers are visiting Serannian,” Emily told him.  She indicated each of them with her hands.  “Poe, and Ben.”

“Yes,” said Kuranes, “hello.  You’ve never been to the Dreamlands before, have you?”  Without waiting for an answer, he gestured to a settee nearby.  “Please, sit.”  Kylo and Poe had to sit side-by-side on the small piece of furniture, and Poe slipped out of his jacket first so that Kylo could feel the heat rising from Poe’s bare arm, through his own cloak.  He wondered if his senses were heightened there, even though the Force had been stripped from him.

Emily sat in a straight-backed, cane-seated chair across from them with her delicate ankles crossed, and she looked at Kuranes.

“They wanted to see your palace,” she told him.

“Oh?”  The king smiled again and looked at the two younger men.  “And what do you think?  Do you like it?”

“Yes!” enthused Poe, then added awkwardly, “Er, your. . . majesty.  We—I like Serannian too, all of it.  It’s beautiful.  You really created it all yourself?”  Kylo recognized Poe’s tendency to talk too much when nervous, and Kylo smiled—both at the familiar quality and at the thought of Poe Dameron being nervous over dreaming that he appeared before a king.

Kuranes nodded.  “Yes, Serannian and Celephaïs and the Valley of Ooth-Nargai all.  But I deserve no praise for it—I only dreamed them, as anyone might.”  He sighed and looked so embittered, Kylo wondered, _How can he speak of it like that, of dreaming whole cities into such an existence that other beings can make their homes there?  How can he ever tire of it?_

“King Kuranes is too modest,” said Emily.  She turned her lavender eyes from the king to Poe, then to Kylo.  “Anyone might dream of a place, but most beings dream only of places and people they’ve seen before, remixing what they’ve experienced in daily life.  Kuranes is that rarest of dreamers, one who can create completely new places in his dreams.”

“Emily, my dear lady,” Kuranes clucked, “I do not warrant your praise.”  “Dear lady,” as if she weren’t a mere girl, hardly more than a child.  His tone conveyed fondness but also the utmost respect, and Kylo looked at Emily again, more carefully.

 _Who are you?_ he demanded of her, silently.  **_What_** _are you?_

“If you really didn’t warrant my praise for Serannian or Celephaïs,” Emily retorted, “you would for being one of the few to die in the physical omniverse while living on in the Dreamlands—or for being the _only_ one to face the void beyond the stars without going mad, the only mortal to take the hand of Nyarlathotep and to gaze into the heart of Azathoth without losing himself to insanity.”

“Nyarlathotep,” Kylo breathed, and all three of the others looked at him.

“Ben?” Poe hissed, but Kylo ignored him.

“Who _is_ Nyarlathotep?” Kylo demanded of the king.

“The Crawling Chaos,” said Kuranes, and Kylo waved him off with a frustrated gesture of his hand.  _It’s like trying to talk to Mother,_ he thought before he could stop himself.

“I _know_ that, but what is ‘the Crawling Chaos’?” he persisted.  “Is it a—a deity, a god?  Or is it. . . _nothing_ , is it truly chaos?  Is it entropy?”  When Kuranes only continued to look at him mildly, Kylo clenched his teeth and half-rose from his seat.  “Tell me, I have to know!”

“Calm down!” Poe snapped at him.  He grabbed Kylo’s wrist and jerked, forcing him back down in his seat.  “You’re being rude.”  Kylo glared at him, and Poe glared back.

“No, it is all right,” Kuranes murmured.  “Better to ask and satisfy your curiosity than to try to discover for yourself.”  He sighed again and glanced at Emily.  “Although you would be able to explain better.”

“Nyarlathotep isn’t a deity,” said Emily, “not precisely.  But neither is he blind entropy.  He thinks, he feels—he’s. . . he is a man.  Immortal, ageless, but not infinite.  A man.”

The way she said it— _he is a man—_ coupled with the lowering of her eyes stunned Kylo, stunned and shook him.

“He tried to destroy Serannian once, didn’t he?” Poe asked, cautiously interjecting himself into the conversation with the politeness Kylo lacked.  “Last night, someone told us about it.  Nyarla—the Crawling Chaos attacked the city, but everyone else dreamed it back into being.”

“Yes,” Kuranes nodded.  “He did so partially to annoy me—he resents me for my abilities as a dreamer. But also, while he is not purely chaos, he does embody it.  He enjoys breaking things.”

“That sounds familiar,” Poe said under his breath.  Kylo ignored him again.

“So he broke Serannian,” Kuranes went on.  “Emily gathered some brave creatures in an attempt to stop him—that attempt failed, but they led the other dreamers of the omniverse to rebuild our city, and now it is even more beautiful than before.”

Kylo turned back to Emily, and she raised her eyes to challenge the look he gave her.

Kylo muttered, “You fought him.  But you couldn’t stop him.”

“No,” she said.  “I _could_ have, maybe, but he would have come back and tried again, and again and again.  The best way was to let him win. . . then show him that it made no difference whether he won or not.  He can’t stop us from dreaming.”

“Maybe not those of you who live here—and those of you who are already dead,” Kylo growled with a gesture at Kuranes, “but what about the rest of us?  If he kills us in our dreams, we don’t wake up, do we, and then what?  No one can just _dream us back to life_.”  He was aware of Poe staring at him now, but only Emily voiced the question they all must have for Kylo.

“Why would Nyarlathotep want to kill _you_?”

Kylo did not answer her.

After a moment, Emily went on, “I don’t know what would happen if he did.  Perhaps you _would_ truly die.  I cannot say.”

“Nyarlathotep has touched you, hasn’t he?” Kuranes asked Kylo.  Emily’s curious eyes widened, and Kylo looked away from her, to regard the king instead.  The pity he saw on Kuranes’s face angered him, but for once, Kylo held his temper.

“Yes,” he replied in a low, tight voice.  Beside him, Poe drew in a breath that shook.

“If he’s marked you, you likely _can’t_ escape him,” said the king.  “He has at his disposal power I cannot comprehend.  Nyarlathotep is more even than what Emily has said—he is the son of blind Azathoth and the mouthpiece of the Outer Gods.  If they are a court, he is jester and vizier and prince and general, all at once.  He has a thousand forms and a thousand names.”

“I don’t _care_ ,” snapped Kylo.  Holding his temper was growing more difficult.  “I will not submit to him—I _can’t_.”

“Why?” retorted Emily.  Her previous manner, gentle and mild, was falling away, and she didn’t seem so young anymore.  “Because you’re stubborn and proud?  Nyarlathotep is stubborn and proud too—and whoever you are in the waking omniverse, you are _nothing_ here.  If he wants to kill you, he will.  And even if someone _could_ dream you back to life, is there anyone who would want to?”

“Emily, please,” Kuranes nearly groaned, much like Poe had tried earlier to calm Kylo.  Kylo hardly heard.  Instead, he heard blood pounding in his ears, and the words he wanted to say but could not: _He doesn’t want to kill me, he wants to kill **Poe** , and if I could just dream Poe back into my life, I would have done so a thousand times before now._

The girl took a deep breath—Kylo saw her narrow chest rise and fall with an unnatural slowness—then she said, “But it doesn’t matter, and you shouldn’t worry.  You are safe here.  Nyarlathotep will not return to Serannian.”

\--

Before they parted from Kuranes, he invited Kylo and Poe to spend the evening and night at his palace.  The king did not seem to be offended at Kylo’s outburst or attitude, although Emily spoke to Kylo only grudgingly from then on.  That night, at a banquet over which Kuranes presided, Kylo and Poe ate for the first time since they’d begun to dream.  The food was delicious, and Kylo felt his hunger return the second he smelled it, but thoughts of Nyarlathotep and Emily’s words— _If he wants to kill you, he will_ —weighed Kylo down whenever he came close to enjoying himself.  At his side all evening, Poe was cheerful and talkative, and everyone they met became enamored of him.

From other guests, Kylo overheard more about Kuranes, that the king was unhappy there in Serannian or even in his capital city of Celephaïs.  Utopia was boring, it seemed, and what Kuranes truly longed for was the quiet, commonplace village of his childhood.  He had tried to recreate the world of youth in the Dreamlands, yet no matter how perfectly he replicated it, something remained missing—something lost in time that couldn’t be dreamed back.

When he heard that story, although he showed no signs of pity for the sovereign of Serannian, Kylo realized that Kuranes understood his plight in a way that Emily never could.  Whatever she was, Emily was nothing mortal, and she couldn’t know about the things that couldn’t be dreamed back.

Once the sun had finally set, darkness shrouded the single turret of Kuranes’s palace.  From the city streets below, the inhabitants of Serannian lit paper lanterns that floated up into the sky, drew even with the windows of the banquet hall, then continued upward.  Kuranes himself took Kylo and Poe to a room reserved for his guests and left them there.  Like their room at the inn (Kylo wondered if the little plant creature was looking for him there), this bedroom held two beds, both layered with soft bedding and cornered with four posters carved of some hard, dark wood.  Canopies of sparkling, translucent silk draped each bed.

“I always wanted a canopy bed,” Poe commented as he stripped out of his jacket.  He started to toss it on one bed, then thought better of it and hung the jacket carefully in the wardrobe instead.

Kylo, who had had a canopy bed once and felt smothered by it, did not reply.  The room seemed small with the two large beds and the wardrobe crammed in it, and Kylo had to brush against Poe’s shoulder as he walked past, moving toward a set of double doors that opened out onto a narrow balcony.  Like everything else in the room, the doors were overly ornate, and each was set with fifteen small, rectangular window panes.

Kylo opened the doors and stepped out onto the balcony.  The room was nearly halfway up the tower, and the lights in the streets below seemed like pinpoints from that height.  Still, their room was nowhere near the top of the tower, where Poe had wanted to sleep.

“You should have asked for a room at the top,” Kylo muttered when he heard one of the doors creak behind him.  Poe slipped out to stand beside him, cautiously neutral as he had been when they first arrived in Serannian.  His obvious, clumsy attempt at not angering Kylo only irritated Kylo more; it reminded him of how his father used to act around him.

“This is fine,” said Poe.  He leaned out over the balustrade, so far that Kylo felt like grabbing him and hauling him back lest he fall.  _Could he die here, by falling?_ Kylo wondered.  _Nyarlathotep would be disappointed._

The faint sound of music reached them from the streets, and Serannian’s moon began to creep up the dark sky.  It looked large and nearly full, and it shone an orange-yellow light reflected from the Dreamlands’ set sun.  The light made Poe’s skin seem to glow.  Kylo glanced at him; when he saw that Poe was entranced by the moon, Kylo turned his head to look at openly at the other man’s profile.  Then, with no warning at all, Poe turned and looked back at him.  Poe’s dark eyes pierced into the center of Kylo’s very being.

“What did Kuranes mean,” Poe asked, “when he said that Nyarlathotep touched you?”

Kylo’s eyes flicked from one of Poe’s to the other, hunted.

“Nothing,” he muttered.  “He’s crazy.”

“ _Ben_.”  Poe reached up to place both hands on Kylo’s shoulders, and Kylo flinched at his touch.  Poe’s beautiful eyes widened with hurt, but then his lids dropped again and he hissed, “What did he mean? _Tell_ me.  Who is Nyarlathotep?”  He didn’t let go.

“He’s—he’s what everyone has said.  A. . . a monster, a _thing_.”  Kylo finally jerked his eyes away from Poe’s and looked over the smaller man’s head at the glimmering lights of the city.

“But—how did he touch you?” Poe persisted.  “When?  _Where?_ ”  When Kylo didn’t answer, Poe put his hands to Kylo’s face, cupping his jaws and turning his head down so that Kylo was forced to meet his eyes again.  Poe’s small hands felt warm and so familiar cradling his face like they used to do long ago.  Kylo finally spoke and was horrified when he heard a fleeting quiver in his voice.

“L-last night, when we were asleep at the inn, I dreamed about Nyarlathotep,” Kylo said.  “I dreamed about him destroying Serannian.”  Poe relaxed the tiniest bit, demonstrated only by a minute lifting of his brows, but he kept his hands on Kylo’s face.

Kylo went on in a thoughtful murmur, “That must be what Kuranes meant, not that Nyarlathotep. . . literally touched me.  But he spoke to me in my dream.  I thought. . . I thought it was _just_ a dream.”  Remembering Nyarlathotep lifting his hand, casting forth the fog that had murdered Poe and the airship which carried him, Kylo flinched a second time and pulled away from the other man’s grasp.  He turned his back on Poe and gripped the balustrade instead, leaning over it to stare down into the streets of the city.

“He knew me,” Kylo whispered.  “He said that—that I thought he and I were alike, but that we aren’t alike at all.  He said that he is chaos, and chaos always destroys order.”  Kylo closed his eyes, better to feel the words as he spoke.  “Chaos consumes order.  And Nyarlathotep—in my dream, he consumed _you_.”

“Me?”  Despite Kylo’s withdrawal, Poe pursued him and came to stand again at his side.  “I was in the dream too?”

“He killed you.”  The words came out flat, and Kylo still kept his eyes closed.  “You were aboard an airship, and he destroyed it.  I couldn’t—I can’t use the Force here, but in that dream I could, and I still—I still couldn’t fight him.”  The words came tumbling out, and Kylo could no more stop them than he could stop Nyarlathotep’s attack.  He hunched over the railing and rasped, “I tried, I tried to save you, but I couldn’t.  Nyarlathotep said that you would die unless I asked him to save you, but he—he was the one—”

Kylo finally silenced himself, but his shoulders hitched of their own accord.  Poe kept silent too for a moment, and when he did speak, his voice was soft and unsure.

“It was only a dream—not even a dream like this, just a regular dream.”

“No,” Kylo whispered.  “It meant something.  Kuranes was right—Nyarlathotep truly spoke to me.  He has marked me, and you as well.  It’s like Kuranes said, Nyarlathotep envies any mortal who is a skilled dreamer, anyone who dares to seek out the Dreamlands.  He’s envious of me, and this is how he’s decided to humiliate me: he means to kill you, unless I submit to him and beg him to spare you.”

“Then why not let him have me?”  Now Poe’s voice was the one which sounded flat.  “What’s it to you if I live or die?”

“ _Poe,_ ” Kylo hissed.  He clenched his hands over the balustrade and opened his eyes to look down at his white knuckles and the claw-like grip of his long fingers.  “I will not let you die.”

He knew Poe didn’t believe himself to be in any true danger, not from something that would happen in a dream, but just as strongly, Kylo also knew that Nyarlathotep would do everything in his power to take Poe from him.

“Why not?” Poe asked again.  When Kylo finally was able to lift his head and look at the other man, Poe had turned his back on the city and was leaning against the balustrade, arms folded across his chest.  “It’s not like you haven’t thrown me away before.”

Anger tried to rise in Kylo at the words—which he knew Poe said deliberately to incite him—but a layer of misery held down his rage.  Poe was right, and Kylo knew it.

But then Poe continued, “And it’s not like I don’t deserve it.”

“What?” Kylo croaked, staring at him.  Poe didn’t look back at him, instead tucking his chin so that he gazed down at the creamy marble tiles of the balcony flooring.

“I’ve never been good enough for you,” Poe murmured.  “If I had been, if I had done more. . . I know it’s not all my fault, but I’m never going to stop blaming myself.”

“Blaming yourself—for _what_?” Kylo stammered.  Then Poe raised his head and pinned Kylo with his eyes.

“For you turning to the Dark.”

\--

To be continued


	5. Chapter 5

Kylo couldn’t speak.

“I should have done more,” said Poe.  “I should have loved you better, I should have told you how much I care for you _._   If you had known what you mean to me, maybe—maybe I would have been enough.”  His deep brown eyes shone with unshed tears, reflecting the moonlight that turned his skin to gold.  Then Poe blinked, and the tears spilled out, one down each side of his face.

“Don’t cry,” Kylo murmured.  Seeing resentment and anger, even hatred, on Poe’s face had been better than seeing the hurt and sorrow there now.

“You think I _want_ to?  I can’t help it,” muttered Poe.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Kylo told him.  “What the Dark offers me that the Light cannot. . . it has nothing to do with you.”

“Of course not, I know it was never about me.”  Poe blinked again and ducked his head once more.  The yellow moonlight lit up the tear track on the side of his face.  “But at the same time—it was _always_ about me, too, wasn’t it?  You knew I was fighting against you.  You thought that if I really loved you, I would have followed you—right?  You can’t tell me you didn’t think that.”

“And _you_ thought that if _I_ really loved _you_ , I wouldn’t have gone.”  Kylo took one step toward Poe, trailing his hand along the balustrade.  “But I never expected anything less from you than what you did.  You’ll do what you believe to be right, no matter what.”

“So will you, I guess.  And that’s why the Crawling Chaos said you and he aren’t anything alike,” Poe sighed.  “If he destroyed Serannian just to annoy Kuranes—if he’ll kill _me_ just to annoy _you_. . . he must know that’s not _right_.”

“You think I’d be _annoyed_?” Kylo groaned.  “Poe, really, you can’t—I’m not going to let him kill you.  I’ll find a way to save you!”  Something in Poe snapped then, and he pushed himself off the balustrade with his hands and rounded on Kylo.

“Did it ever occur to you that I don’t _need_ you to save me?” Poe nearly shouted.  “I can save _myself_.  I didn’t come this far to let some—some vengeful, petty god- _thing_ kill me in _your_ dream!”

“Dammit, Poe, you won’t have a _choice_!” Kylo yelled back at him.  “Not if it’s like what I saw!  He _vaporized_ you, you and that airship we saw yesterday.  All the fancy flying you could possibly do won’t save you.”

“Yeah?” growled Poe.  “Well, neither will _you_.  What if I just wake myself up?  What about that?”

“Then the next time you sleep, the next time you dream—he’ll be there.  And I _won’t_ , and someday I’ll hear that they found you dead—”  Poe’s two tears had long since dried, but Kylo felt his own start in his eyes.  Before Kylo could turn away, Poe saw and stared up at him.

Kylo gave up then.  He no longer cared how vulnerable he made himself to Poe Dameron, because really, what did it matter?  Whatever happened, Kylo _would_ wake up eventually, and very likely, he would never see Poe again, in the physical universe or anywhere else.

“I couldn’t kill you when I had you captive, and I can’t let someone else kill you now,” said Kylo.  Poe appeared slightly blurry in his vision, but no tears fell.  “I still love you, Poe.”

Poe continued to stare at him, his perfect mouth slightly open.  Kylo took another step toward him and lifted a hand to Poe’s cheek, where he touched the dried trail Poe’s tear had left.  Poe didn’t protest or draw back—in fact, Poe didn’t move.  Kylo’s fingers shook; then he pressed his hand to Poe’s face and cupped his jaw.  Poe’s skin felt warm, and his pulse beat under Kylo’s fingertips.

“Ben,” he muttered, “you can’t—you shouldn’t—don’t _tell_ me that.”  But he pressed his cheek against Kylo’s palm and closed his eyes.

“I don’t care if I shouldn’t,” said Kylo.  “I do.  I love you.”  He put his other hand to Poe’s face too then slid it up into the dark brown curls of the smaller man’s hair.  Poe felt so good, so _right_ in his hands.

“Ben,” Poe whispered; then he lurched up on his toes and crushed his mouth against Kylo’s.  He grasped the back of Kylo’s neck with both hands and held himself up as they kissed.  As soon as Kylo’s lips parted, Poe’s tongue was in his mouth, thrusting in deep.  Kylo clenched his fingers into Poe’s hair and pushed the smaller man up against the balustrade for leverage as he fought back with his own tongue.

Kylo heard Poe inhale deeply through his nose; then Poe pulled his head back to draw another gasping breath.

“I love you,” Poe rasped, “I never _stopped_ loving you.”  He kissed Kylo again and again, drawing away whenever Kylo tried to return the kisses, only to dart his head forward to claim Kylo’s mouth once more.  In between, Poe mumbled nearly incoherent sentiments: “If love could have kept you from the Dark—no, it couldn’t have, because I _couldn’t_ love you harder or better.  No one could love you more than I do.”  Finally, he let Kylo have his mouth, and Kylo kissed him desperately.

After their kisses slowed, Poe sank back down on his heels with his face still tilted up, lips parted and glistening with a mixture of their saliva.  Kylo stared at him, and Poe stared back.

“How can you still love me?” Poe whispered.  Then, as if only repeating the same question, “How can you save me?”

“I don’t know,” Kylo whispered back, answering both questions at once.  “But I do.  And I will.  Poe, I won’t let you go again.  I won’t—”  He broke off then made himself finish.  “Won’t th-throw you away—Poe, I’m _sorry_.”  It was something he never could have admitted in the waking universe.  To apologize, even to feel regret. . . that was not the way of the Dark, and it was everything that Kylo had spent years steeling himself against.

Yet words couldn’t begin to express the regret Kylo did feel when he looked down into Poe Dameron’s dark eyes.  At that moment, admitting it was acceptable.

Poe nodded, slowly.  He lifted his hand from the back of Kylo’s neck to his hair, pushing the black strands back from the side of his face.

“And I won’t leave you,” Poe murmured. “I won’t give up on you, not this time.”  He dropped his hand from Kylo’s hair and draped his arms over the taller man’s shoulders instead.  Poe leaned into his chest and whispered, “Can you forget it all, for a little while?  Ben, I want to be with you, the way we used to be.  Without the Dark—without the _Light_ , and without any damned Crawling Chaos.  Just you and me.”

Kylo pressed his face against Poe’s hair and mumbled Poe’s name into it.  Poe leaned up, and his lips brushed Kylo’s ear wetly.  The feel of them sent a pang of desire through Kylo, desire he thought he’d suppressed forever.

“Poe,” he groaned again.  Poe flicked his tongue over Kylo’s earlobe then trailed kisses down the taller man’s neck.  Kylo felt Poe’s teeth nip at his skin, and he tightened his arms around Poe’s waist; but then Poe drew back and looked up at him.

“Ben?” he whispered.  “Just you and me?”

Kylo lifted his hands to cup Poe’s pretty face as he nodded.  “Yes.  Just you and me.”

Poe let Kylo kiss him again; then he grasped the front of Kylo’s cloak and tugged, pulling him back into their room.  They left the doors open, and the strains of music reached them, carried on a cooling breeze.  Poe lifted his hands to Kylo’s throat and began to unfasten his cloak.

“I’m glad you don’t have that awful mask here,” Poe murmured.  He pushed Kylo’s cloak from his shoulders and rested his hands on them as he looked up into the taller man’s eyes.  “I want to be able to see your true face, and hear your true voice.”

“I didn’t choose what I was wearing when I appeared here,” Kylo told him.

“Neither did I,” said Poe with a shrug.  He trailed his hands down Kylo’s chest to his waist, then lifted his eyes to Kylo’s once more.  “I don’t even have that leather jacket anymore, not in real life—I gave it to Finn.”

“Finn?”  Kylo thought he hid the flare of jealousy he felt, but Poe’s eyes sparkled, and he laughed.

“Never mind.”  Poe started opening Kylo’s shirt, and he slid warm hands over Kylo’s chest once it was exposed.  His fingers traced the spots and blemishes marking Kylo’s pale skin, then came to rest over the spot where his pulse beat beneath his flesh.  Poe’s mouth was at just that height, and he leaned forward to press a kiss over Kylo’s heart.

“I missed you,” Poe whispered.  The heat of his breath sank into Kylo’s bare skin.  “I missed how you feel, and how you taste.  When you had me captured, you were so different—I thought maybe you were gone forever.  But you were still _you_ , underneath, even though you were so cold to me. . . even though you hurt me.”

Kylo drew in and exhaled harsh, ragged breaths.  He couldn’t say how close he had come to breaking down, coming undone and giving in when he’d had Poe alone, when he’d heard the hate in Poe’s voice snarling, “The Resistance will not be intimidated by you”—because Kylo had also heard the message beneath the words.  **_I_** _will not be intimidated by you.  I will not give in to you, because I don’t need you anymore.  I don’t need you, I don’t want you, I don’t love you._

Coldness toward Poe, _hurting_ Poe, had been necessary in order to keep Kylo from falling apart.  He felt as if the Light and the Dark were constantly at war within him, and Poe could never know how close he’d come to helping the Light win, to shattering the armor of Kylo Ren and exposing fragile, worthless Ben Solo once more.

And yet, here was Poe saying that he had loved, _still_ loved Ben Solo, that Ben was the one he missed and wanted.

 _Ben is all I am here,_ Kylo thought, _and I am useless, no good to Poe or to anyone else.  Emily was right: I am nothing here._

Poe was looking up at him, frowning.

“Ben?”

Kylo dropped his eyes to Poe’s and said, “I was thinking about what Emily said.  If Nyarlathotep took me, instead of you, if I died and someone could dream me back to life. . . is there anyone who would want to?”  He looked away from Poe, over the shorter man’s head, without really seeing anything.  “No. . . I think not.”

“Stop being a melodramatic idiot,” Poe grumbled.  “I would, of course—didn’t I say I loved you?  But I thought Nyarlathotep wants _me_ , not you.  You’re not thinking of. . . of bargaining with him, are you?  Because I get the impression he’s a cheat, and anyway, I’m not going to let you trade places with me, if that’s what you’re angling for.”

Kylo muttered, “That’s not what I’m thinking of,” and he pushed Poe away from him.  For a terrible second, he thought Poe’s face was going to crumble into tears, but then the smaller man composed it into a stony glare.

“What _were_ you thinking of, then?”

“That no one would want me back if I were to. . . die, or to disappear into this world entirely.  Even you.”  When Poe opened his mouth to make an angry protest, Kylo cut him off, “I don’t doubt your sincerity, Poe, but—but you don’t love _me_.  You love who I used to be, you love _Ben_.  I’m not that anymore.  I can’t ever be that again.  Not here, not in the waking universe, not anywhere.”  He turned away from Poe, escaping the intent eyes glaring up at him from beneath their heavy brows, and went to the balcony doors.  There was still music outside, music and lights coming up from the streets of the cloud-and-marble city Kuranes had built in his dreams.

“I’m of the Dark now, not the Light,” murmured Kylo, “and. . . and nobody wants me like this.  The First Order respects me, or fears me, or—”  He thought of the Supreme Leader.  “—or _uses_ me.  The Resistance hates me.  _You_ hate me, who I am now; my mother—if she didn’t before, she must _now_.”  Kylo gripped the handles of the two doors in fists so tight, his knuckles turned white; then he flung them closed with a snarl of rage.  They banged and rattled in their frames, and Kylo beat his fists upon them.  Somehow, the glass didn’t shatter, although he wished it would.

 _I wish it would shatter and cut me into a million pieces,_ he thought.

“Stop it!” Poe shouted at him.  Kylo felt Poe’s hand close over his shoulder; then the smaller man yanked backwards, hard, and bodily flung Kylo around to face him.  Poe face was dark with a fury that might have even matched Kylo’s.

“You fucking _moron_ ,” Poe yelled, “what is the _matter_ with you?”  Kylo stared at him, wondering if Poe had somehow read his mind, or if Kylo had voiced aloud what he’d thought about wanting to be cut to pieces, about wanting to die.  Or maybe Poe was just the first person in a long while to point out the ridiculousness of the violence Kylo inflicted on inanimate objects whenever he got angry.

Poe stared back up at him, chest heaving; then he jerked forward and reached up.  Kylo flinched, thinking Poe was about to strike him, but the smaller man only clasped Kylo’s face in his hands, fingers curling over the back of his jaw.

“I _love_ you,” Poe hissed in a fierce whisper.  “ _You_.  I call you Ben because that’s who you _are_ , whatever you think to the contrary—but I’ll call you Kylo if that’s what you want, if that’s what it takes to make you believe me.”  He rose up on his toes so that their faces were almost level, noses nearly touching, and whispered, “I love you, Kylo Ren, and I will _always_ love you.  I love you, and your mother loves you, and—and even that little plant thing back at the inn loves you!  _You.  Are.  Loved._ ”

Kylo blinked, unaware of the tears that had welled in his eyes until they spilled down his face.

Unrelenting, Poe continued, “You are not the Dark now, any more than you were all Light back then.  _None_ of us is all one thing or the other—and I think _that’s_ what’s the matter with you, you’ve always expected everyone to be perfectly one or the other.  Your parents disappointed you, your uncle disappointed you, _I_ disappointed you, because we weren’t perfect in the Light.  And now you disappoint yourself, because _you_ can’t be perfect in the Dark.  But you’re not _supposed_ to be.”

Kylo was still weeping, silently, and Poe’s face finally lost its look of intense concentration, and softened.  He pushed Kylo back, gently, until his thighs hit the high bed; then Poe pressed him down to sit on its edge.  Poe’s hands left Kylo’s face and went into his hair, stroking it back as the pilot bent his head and kissed Kylo’s face just under one eye, catching his tears.

“I will fight for you,” Poe murmured against Kylo’s skin.  “I’ll fight Nyarlathotep or the First Order or whoever I have to, to keep you with me.  I’m not going to lose you again.”

“I’m not worth it,” Kylo breathed, finally tracing the tangle of his emotions back to the thought that had so upset him in the first place.  “I am nothing here— _or_ there.  I can have all the power in the galaxy, but I’ll still be. . . nothing, nothing that _matters_.”

“That’s not true.”  Poe’s lips left Kylo’s cheek, and he rested their foreheads against one another.  “Kylo, Ben. . . you’re not nothing.  You’re my _everything_.”  He straddled Kylo’s thighs and dropped down to sit in his lap, and he didn’t resist when Kylo suddenly tilted his head to the side and kissed Poe, deeply and hungrily.  For the first time, for a little while at least, Kylo believed what Poe was telling him, and had _always_ told him: _Poe **does** love me, exactly as I am, and even if I matter to no one else, I matter to **him**._

“I love you,” Kylo whispered into Poe’s mouth between kisses.  “Poe, I love you, and I’ll fight for you too.  If the only way to fight for you is to submit, to beg Nyarlathotep to save you, I’ll do it.  I’ll do whatever it takes.”

“Just tell me you love me,” Poe demanded.  He grasped a handful of Kylo’s hair and used it to draw the larger man’s head back until Poe could look in his eyes.  “Tell me again.  Make me believe it.”

“I love you, Poe Dameron,” said Kylo.  “I missed you too, how you feel and taste, the sound of your voice and the way you look at me.”  Poe looked at him like that just then, dropping his eyelids even lower than normal until they half-obscured his brown irises, and his long upper lashes almost met his lower ones.  Poe’s eyes smoldered, and they rekindled the desire Kylo’s rage had smothered.

He tightened his arms around Poe’s waist and stood, lifting Poe up before spinning to lay him on his back on the bed, knees at the edge and lower legs dangling off the side.  Poe gasped in surprise and his eyes widened, only to fall nearly closed again when Kylo lurched forward and crushed his mouth against the side of Poe’s neck.

“I want you,” Kylo growled into Poe’s brown skin.  His words sounded almost nonsensical, peppered in between mixed kisses and nips to the pilot’s neck and throat.  “I want to love you, I _need_ you.”

“Nngh, Ben,” Poe groaned, and now Kylo didn’t bristle at hearing his old name.  Coming as Poe’s cry of desire for him, it only sounded right.  “Ben, please, love me, love me like you used to!”

Kylo pushed the hem of Poe’s shirt up and slid his hands up the pilot’s chest; then Poe lifted his arms and struggled to strip his shirt off entirely until Kylo helped.  He caught one of Poe’s toned arms in his hands and pressed his lips to the muscles there.  Poe’s body was exactly as beautiful as Kylo had remembered, even recreated in a dream.  Yet it also still possessed the little flaws and imperfections that made Poe human, and those made Kylo love him all the more.

Poe stopped Kylo’s adoration of his arm with a chuckle, by pushing the larger man back enough to finish opening Kylo’s shirt and slide it off his broad shoulders.  Poe trailed a fingertip down his sternum, then splayed his hand over Kylo’s left pectoral.  When Poe’s fingers brushed his nipple, Kylo gasped.

Poe gave a low, throaty laugh and pulled Kylo down against him, latching his mouth over the nipple and sucking hard.  When it came erect, he bit it, and Kylo groaned Poe’s name.

“I still know what you like,” Poe growled against his chest, “and how you like it.”  He bit the other nipple then locked his arms around Kylo’s chest and turned over, rolling on top of the larger man and looking down into his flushed face with wide, dilated eyes.  “And I can still give it to you better than anyone else ever could.”

Kylo didn’t tell Poe that he’d never given anyone else the chance.  He didn’t think that was something Poe needed to know, and anyway, he didn’t want to hear whatever Poe’s rejoinder would be, probably that Poe had had all kinds of lovers since their last time together, and all of them better than Kylo.  He pushed the thought away and cuffed a hand over the back of Poe’s neck to pull his head down and kiss him again.  Poe kissed him back with growing franticness, and he shoved his hands between them to fumble at Kylo’s waist, trying to get his pants open.  As Poe pulled away from his mouth, Kylo grappled for him, but the pilot eluded his grasp and went down on his knees at the side of the bed.  He’d gotten Kylo’s pants undone and was tugging them sharply, yanking them down past Kylo’s hips to free his erection.  Kylo pushed himself up on his elbows and looked down at Poe leaning up between his thighs.

“Poe—” he began but dissolved into swearing when Poe’s mouth engulfed him.  Poe had never been able to deep throat him, but he lowered his head halfway and closed his fist around the rest, and he didn’t falter when Kylo groaned and bucked his hips up.  All sorts of things might have been possible there in the dream realm—things to rival what Kylo had imagined doing to Poe using the Force, even long after he’d left Poe, as his powers grew stronger.  But just then, Kylo could think of nothing he wanted more than what he was already feeling, Poe’s lips wrapped around his erection, tongue against the underside of his shaft, and hands gripping and squeezing his spread thighs.

Poe hummed around him, and Kylo locked his fingers into the curls of the pilot’s dark hair.  Poe raised his eyes to look up at Kylo through his lashes, knowing, remembering the effect that gesture had always had.  Kylo gritted his teeth and curled his toes as he tried to hold back, but he climaxed within seconds anyway, no more than a couple minutes after Poe had started going down on him.

He got as far as gasping, “Fuck, Poe, I’m—” before he came; then he gave in and let it happen with  quick, rough thrusts into Poe’s mouth as his cock pulsed.  Poe closed his eyes and swallowed, and he kept sucking until Kylo had finished and drew back, cringing, as he became too sensitive to take any more.  Poe sat back with his lips parted and his breath panting in short gasps.

“I’m sorry,” Kylo mumbled, more out of embarrassment than in actual apology.  “I didn’t want to come so fast.”

“Don’t be sorry.”  Poe flexed his jaw so that it popped and gave a regretful chuckle.  “I can’t do it for very long.  Never was any good at it, you’re too big.”

Kylo scoffed, “Not good at it!” and surprised himself by laughing.  A wave of dizziness washed through him as he sat up; then his head cleared and he looked down at the shorter man still kneeling beside the bed.  As ridiculous as Kylo felt sitting there with his pants around his ankles, Poe was looking up at him with a kind of wonder.

“You’re smiling,” Poe murmured.  “I thought I’d never see your smile again—thought you’d never smile again for _me_ , anyway.”

“Poe. . . .”  Kylo couldn’t think of anything worthy to say, just as he could never believe his smile would be worthy of Poe.  He looked away as he drew his legs up to tug off first his boots, then his pants. Poe didn’t move until Kylo leaned forward and grasped his upper arms.

“Come up here,” Kylo whispered.  He pulled on Poe’s arms until the pilot rose and crawled up onto the bed, still clothed save for his shirt.  Kylo embraced Poe and coaxed him to lie down, then dropped his hands to Poe’s waist.  Poe was hard, and he groaned when Kylo rubbed a palm over his groin.

“Please,” Poe muttered, “Ben, please. . . .”  Kylo sat up to remove Poe’s shoes, smiling again to see the needy expression on the smaller man’s face.  His smile held no triumph or arrogance at putting Poe at his mercy; instead, it was only tender.  Kylo _felt_ tenderness for the first time since he could remember, and he wanted nothing more than to bring pleasure to his lover.

 _Not just my lover,_ he thought while he pulled Poe’s pants down and off his short, sculpted legs.  _My beloved._

Kylo lay between Poe’s legs and caressed him, licking and kissing every inch of his flesh as Poe whimpered and writhed against his mouth, eventually locking his legs around Kylo’s shoulders and holding the larger man down to him.

Only when Poe moaned, “Please, Ben, please let me come!” did Kylo close his mouth over his erection and suck.  He worked his way down Poe’s shaft, relaxing his throat as much as he could and fighting back the urge to panic and choke, until his lips were wrapped around the base and he could swallow around the pilot’s cock.  Poe pulled on his hair and held Kylo’s head down as he fucked his mouth.  Poe was rough with him, exactly the way Kylo liked, and he felt himself start to stiffen again just as the pilot arched his back and groaned from deep in his chest.  As soon as Poe’s fingers relaxed in his hair, Kylo pulled back and sucked the head of Poe’s cock to taste him as Poe finished.

Poe collapsed on his back, and Kylo sat up.  He coughed and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, then lay down beside Poe with his head raised so he could see Poe’s face.  The pilot’s eyes were closed, and he was still breathing hard.

“Ben,” he whispered.  His eyes opened and fixed on Kylo’s face.  “I love you.”

“I love you too.”  Kylo kissed his forehead, then the end of his nose, then his lips.  “Poe. . . .”  He knew there was more to say than that, but he didn’t know how to say it.  He didn’t _want_ to say it.  What he wanted to say was that he’d stay there in Serannian forever if it meant staying with Poe.

 _But I can’t say that,_ Kylo thought as he bent his head over Poe and they looked at one another.  _Because he’d never agree, he wouldn’t give up real life to be with me—not with everything and everyone else he has to live for.  And anyway, Kuranes thought he wanted to be here forever too, and now look at him, longing for the mundane in the midst of a world he created himself from his very dreams.  Eventually, I’ll want to wake up too._

Yet even so, waking up would mean losing Poe all over again, probably forever, and Kylo couldn’t face that, not yet.

He kissed Poe again then sat up just long enough to pull the bedclothes back and slide under them.  Poe scrabbled amidst the sheets to cover up too, and he tugged them up over himself and Kylo both.  Kylo wrapped his arms around Poe, and the smaller man curled against him, fitting alongside Kylo’s body as he always had: perfectly.  Kylo pressed his cheek to Poe’s hair, and for the second time, they slept within their sleep, and dreamed.

\--

To be continued


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this is such a short chapter, but I’ve pretty much had the entire rest of this fic planned for months, and I need to give myself a kick to actually get it written out. Hopefully, posting something will help.
> 
> BTW, the story of Nyarlathotep’s original attack on Serannian can be read here under the section “The Dream War”:  
> https://subeta.net/petinfo.php?petid=3372818

“These things were. . . well. . . they were dreams-made-real.  And once dreams became real, they escaped the power of the dreamer and became their own deadly things, capable of independent action.”  
\--Stephen King, _IT_

\--

“I’ve been thinking,” said Nyarlathotep.

It was the same dream again, him and Kylo suspended in the sky above the decimated Serannian.  Kylo forced himself to refrain from looking over his shoulder at the fleet of airships he knew was behind him.

“About what?” he muttered, since the Crawling Chaos was clearly waiting for a response.

Nyarlathotep smiled.  He wore the same form as before, that of a slender, handsome humanoid man.

“Your Poe,” he replied.  “Poe Dameron.  He’s quite remarkable for a mortal, isn’t he?”

Kylo watched him with suspicion, and when Nyarlathotep again refused to continue, Kylo asked carefully, “How so?”

But instead of answering, Nyarlathotep said, “I shan’t kill him after all.  It would be a waste, wouldn’t it, and really not fair to him.  Why should _he_ die for _you_?”

Kylo stared at him, wondering if Nyarlathotep expected his thanks.  The deity’s smile grew a bit, further crinkling the delicate skin at the corner of each star-lit eye.

“So when I thought about your Poe, I thought that instead of killing him, I would just keep him here instead.”  Nyarlathotep paused then clarified, “Here in the Dreamlands, that is, not in Serannian, specifically.  It’s too tiresome a place, too much insipid droning of old stories—and all those hateful balloons!”

Kylo had begun trying to speak when Nyarlathotep spoke of keeping Poe in the realm of dreams forever, but he could find no words at first.  The idea was too audacious and too terrible, worse somehow than the thought of Poe dying.  In death, Poe’s spirit would at least be free to become one with the Force.  But to be imprisoned for eternity there in the Dreamlands—would his body lie sleeping forever somewhere out there in the waking galaxy?  Or would Poe, like Kuranes, die to the real omniverse but live forever within his dreams?

Instead of asking those things, Kylo hissed, “Of course you couldn’t keep him in Serannian, because you don’t dare show your face there!  Not in the place where they simply dream away any sign you’ve ever been there!”

For the first time, he saw anger on Nyarlathotep’s regal face.  Fury sparked through the dark eyes and twisted the elegant lips.  The anger lasted only a moment before the deity regained control of himself, but Kylo kept it in mind.  The knowledge of how to make Nyarlathotep feel _anything_ could be useful.

“I resent nothing more,” Nyarlathotep said in a seemingly calm voice, barely above a whisper, “than those who dare too much.  Audacity has its place and is to be commended, but only to a point.  You much decide for yourself where that point is, Kylo Ren.”

As the deity spoke, the creeping mist rose around them and slunk toward where the airships would be hovering. . . the airships and Poe.

“The question,” Nyarlathotep continued with his eyes still fixed on Kylo’s face, “is this: how far will you go?  Will you go as far as the point of no return?  Or will you go beyond it?”

Kylo tried to fight back his awareness of the mist crawling toward the airships, telling himself, _It’s only a dream, a dream that doesn’t matter yet.  What matters is where he’ll take Poe—if Nyarlathotep won’t keep him in Serannian, where will he go?  If he takes Poe away from me and tries to keep him here. . . where will I have to go to get him back?_

Kylo forced his thoughts back to the incessant questions of the man before him, and he turned one back on Nyarlathotep: “How far will I go?  For _what_?”  Nyarlathotep actually shrugged, his narrow, pointed shoulders rising beneath the shimmering white robe that draped them.

“Only you can answer that.  I will be watching with interest, though, to see what ends up being most important to you.”  Nyarlathotep lifted his slim brown hands, palms up and long fingers extended.  As he spoke, he raised and lowered each, as if weighing his own words: “Your lover?  Your desire for what paltry power you can seize in the waking omniverse?”

Kylo bristled—the Force, paltry!  The _galaxy_ (omniverse?), paltry!!—but Nyarlathotep wasn’t finished.  More arms capped with lovely hands appeared from somewhere behind him, maybe sprouting right out of his back.

“Your pride?  The catharsis that childish temper of yours gives you?  Your family?”  Nyarlathotep paused, the fifth hand hovering beside his head as he turned to look at it as if he could see the concept of “family” contained there in his palm.  He exclaimed, “What a tangled web of guilt and love you have _there_ —and I thought I resented _my_ father at times!”

Kylo’s so-called “childish temper” was threatening to get the better of him, and he floundered for a way to quell it for Poe’s sake, to keep Nyarlathotep talking until Kylo learned where to seek him out.  He latched on to the aside: Nyarlathotep’s father.  He had one, Emily had said so.  Nyarlathotep had a father, and he resented him, by his own admission.  Nyarlathotep had a weakness besides those who dreamed back what he destroyed.

“Azathoth,” Kylo muttered.  “She said your father is Azathoth—who is he?”

At the word “she,” Nyarlathotep’s eyes gleamed with pique, but he answered the question mildly: “An idiot—and I mean that quite literally, not the way you might in describing the one who sired _you_.  Azathoth thinks not and sees not.  He merely _is_.  They who call me the Crawling Chaos call him the _Nuclear_ Chaos, the Demon Sultan who has sat at the center of the cosmos since the omniverse’s creation, sat and hungered and gibbered.”

As he spoke, Nyarlathotep’s voice grew less mild, and his five arms began to waver as if Kylo were seeing them through a layer of heated air.  Sometimes they looked like arms, but then they would quiver and suddenly look like so many tentacles.

“And then in his infinite idiocy, great Azathoth decided the omniverse must _know_ his gibbering, and so he had _me_ ,” Nyarlathotep continued, “a son born of no mother but of Azathoth alone to be the messenger of the Outer Gods—the only one of them with a mind or anything else beyond blind, stubborn _will_.”  His evident bitterness only incensed Kylo further.

“What _are_ you?” Kylo demanded.  “Besides the Crawling Chaos, besides the messenger of the Outer Gods—what are you that you spend your time and power tormenting those who ‘dare too much’?”

If he had hoped to rile the deity, Kylo’s question had the opposite effect.  Nyarlathotep smiled, and all his irritation evaporated, as did his extraneous arms.

He folded his two remaining hands in front of himself and said, “Time?  I have plenty of time, for the Outer Gods have few messages to deliver—all gibbering, as I said.  As for what I am, I am what Azathoth is.  And I am what _she_ is.”

“She?” echoed Kylo, but he realized he had already known.  Even without the use of the Force, his suspicion and fear had warned him.

“She,” said Nyarlathotep, and his smile grew, delicate lips drawing back to show perfect, terrible teeth.  “Emily.  She is the same kind of being I am, and for all her pretense of righteousness, she takes far greater pleasure than I do in meddling with mortals’ affairs.  If she wants to play at being Serannian’s guardian angel, so be it.  Here in the Dreamlands, she can recreate whatever I destroy as much as she likes.  But she knows perfectly well what happens when my dreams become real: the omniverse trembles.  You know it too, don’t you?”

Nyarlathotep’s starry eyes fixed on Kylo’s with an unnerving familiarity.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Kylo muttered.

“Yes, you do,” Nyarlathotep whispered, although his voice carried across the distance between them to reach Kylo clearly.  “You were born Ben Solo, and as Ben Solo, you dreamed.  One day, those dreams came true, and on that day, you became Kylo Ren.”

Kylo was shaking his head before Nyarlathotep even finished speaking; then he insisted, “Whatever I dreams I have, they are _mine_.  They had nothing to do with you, before now.”

As if Kylo hadn’t spoken, Nyarlathotep continued, “Not so long ago, I showed some dreams to another boy.  He wasn’t like you, born privileged and spoiled and doted upon, but in other ways—your petulance, your arrogance, your _audacity_ —you have much in common with him.”

For a moment, Kylo thought Nyarlathotep spoke of Poe.  Petulant, arrogant, audacious. . . all words that suited Poe Dameron very well, at least Poe when he was at his worst.

“What did you do to him?” Kylo growled, twinning his hands into fists within the fabric of his robes.  “What dreams did you show him?  _When?_ ”

Nyarlathotep shrugged again.  “Like I said, not very long ago. . . at least to me.  Perhaps a few lifetimes for you mortals.”

_So not Poe, then,_ Kylo thought.  _But. . . whom?_   He suspected, and the suspicion made a feeling of disgusted horror sink into the pit of Kylo’s stomach.

“As for the dreams I showed him. . . ,” Nyarlathotep mused.  He smiled, lifting the corners of a mouth that, while attractive enough, seemed made for sneering instead smiling.  “I showed him a future—not _the_ future, mind you, only what _might_ come to be.  And do you know, he was _so_ arrogant and audacious, he believed not only that he _did_ see the future in his dreams, he believed also that he could _change_ the future, all by himself.”  The deity paused and touched his bottom lip with the tip of his tongue as if his mouth had grown dry while he spoke.

“ _You_ ,” breathed Kylo.  The horror in his gut seeped out of his mouth with the word.  He was beyond anger or rage or even hate.  He felt only sickened.  Nyarlathotep again ignored his interjection.

“He fought so hard to prevent the future he saw in his dreams, he let his fear and anger and hatred consume him.  And so, he created the very future he sought to destroy.  A self-fulfilling prophecy.  Like you, the day his dreams came true was the day he became someone else.”

“You,” Kylo whispered again.  This time, he thought Nyarlathotep really _didn’t_ hear him.  He could barely hear himself.  Nyarlathotep fixed his eyes on Kylo’s face, and now they were black voids with no stars in them at all.  He held out his two hands once more and weighed his words with them.

“You became Kylo Ren. . . as your grandfather Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader.  His dreams—the dreams I gave him—became real, and your galaxy trembled.”  Nyarlathotep closed the hand that represented Vader into a fist and brought it up beside his head in a gesture of power; then he lifted the other hand, still open, and looked at Kylo over it.

“So how far will you go?” Nyarlathotep asked.  “Do you think you can ever be what your grandfather was?  Even I don’t presume to be my father.”

Finally, Kylo found his voice again, and it grew louder the more he spoke: “You— _you_ made Grandfather dream those horrible things as an _experiment,_ just to see what he would do?  Then you dare to call it audacious when he suffered and tried to stop his suffering, you call it arrogant when he _overcame_ it?”

“Did he?”  Nyarlathotep sounded uninterested in the answer, though he stood in the same position as before, with his fist raised and his palm outstretched.  “All right, we will say it is an experiment then. . . an experiment that is not quite finished.  How will you finish it, Kylo Ren, how will you finish what Darth Vader started?  You’ve made your galaxy tremble, yes, but only with your petty tantrums.  You’ve lost your lover, but not for the reason Vader lost his—because he wanted to save her.  Instead, you drove your Poe away, and now you _dare_ to presume you know what’s best for him?  He will be far safer here in the Dreamlands with me than he would be _anywhere_ with you.”

“You are a monster,” Kylo breathed.  It was a puerile accusation, but he felt that “monster” was the only word which could possibly describe Nyarlathotep with any accuracy.

“Of course I am,” returned the deity.  Without any intermediary stage of evolution, his two arms were abruptly tentacles again: horribly kinked and twisted tentacles spotted all over with staring eyes with tri-lobed pupils and irises that were red and gold and some other awful color for which Kylo had no name.  A half-dozen more tentacles lifted, writhing, from his back, standing out apart from his body like rays of a sun, and their hundred or more eyes looked at Kylo with every bit as much disdain as the two eyes in Nyarlathotep’s face.

“I am a monster,” Nyarlathotep repeated.  “I am the Crawling Chaos, and I watch as Chaos ravages Order.  I want to watch as it ravages _you_.”  As he spoke, his head and neck began to change as his arms had, until he no longer resembled a humanoid man.  Instead, another, larger tentacle emerged from his shoulders where his neck had been.  This tentacle was eyeless, but upon it opened a gaping mouth lined with sharp teeth.  Perhaps he meant to frighten Kylo, but Kylo actually found this abominable form more tolerable than Nyarlathotep’s previous guise.  He preferred seeing this reflection of the deity’s true nature to the smiling, false face of a handsome man.

_Is this what Emily is truly like, as well?_ Kylo wondered.  He gazed into the abyss of Nyarlathotep’s squirming form, and the abyss gazed back.  _Or was he lying about that?  No, I don’t think he told me any lies at all, this time at least.  This time, the truth is far more horrible than any lie could be._

The mouth on Nyarlathotep’s head-tentacle was screaming something at him in a language Kylo didn’t know, but he understood the hatred in the tone of the guttural words well enough.

“ _Hai stell'bsna goka y-gotha!_ ” Nyarlathotep shrieked.  “ _Nog lw'nafh ch'shagg syha'h, Kylo Ren!_ ”

Kylo roared back at the deity and launched himself into the empty space between them, high over the desecrated hull of Serannian.  Yet when Kylo’s hands grabbed for the shrieking tentacle, intending to wrench it from the abomination’s body if he could, Nyarlathotep simply dissolved into the same crawling fog that enveloped and disintegrated the airships.  He was the mist, and that was all.  Kylo awoke screaming in pain and fury, screaming for Nyarlathotep to return and face him.

Kylo lay on his back in the bed he shared with Poe and stared up at the ceiling.  It was painted to look like the sky over Serannian with its sunset clouds.  Kylo kept still until his heaving breath calmed; then he turned his head to look at Poe.  He half-expected Poe to be gone—not because of Nyarlathotep, but because Poe had decided to leave him—but the other man was there.

Poe was sitting up beside him, brown skin bared to the waist with the rest of his body covered by a sheet.  He had his head bent forward, and Kylo gazed up at Poe’s beautiful face profiled against the soft morning light coming in through the balcony doors.

“Ben,” Poe muttered.  Without looking at Kylo, he slid his hand across the top of the sheet, seeking Kylo’s touch.  When Kylo closed his hand over Poe’s, the smaller man finally turned to him with a grateful look in his eyes.

“Are you all right?” asked Poe.  “You were crying out in your sleep.”

Kylo was far from all right, but he wasn’t ready to tell Poe what Nyarlathotep had revealed to him in his dreams.

“I’m all right,” he murmured.  “And you?”  Poe shook his head, slowly, and lowered it so that a curl of hair fell over his forehead.  Kylo reached up to smooth it back into place, a gesture that had been an affectionate habit years before.  Poe’s eyes began to shine, and when Kylo dropped his hand, Poe grabbed that one too.

“I saw him,” Poe whispered.  He lifted his eyes to Kylo’s.  “In my dream.  I saw Nyarlathotep.”

\--

To be continued

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In R’lyehian, Nyarlathotep says, “Now pray I will grant you mercy! Come dream and cross over into the Dreamlands forever, Kylo Ren!”


	7. Chapter 7

Tell all the truth but tell it slant—  
Success in Circuit lies  
\--Emily Dickinson

\--

The strength of Kylo’s reaction surprised even himself: he felt a swift and terrible jealousy at the thought of Poe alone with Nyarlathotep.  He squeezed both of Poe’s hands and hissed, “What did he say to you?”

“He told me I should stay here,” Poe muttered.  He lowered his eyes again, heavy brows drawn together in thought.  “He showed me all these things—places I remembered, places I’ve been.  Places where you and I were together.”  Poe blinked and shook his head again, harder than before as if to clear it of the memory of his dream; then he looked up into Kylo’s eyes once more.

“He showed me a place like my old home on Yavin IV, the very same houses and the trees and the—the clearing where you kissed me for the first time.  And he said he knew how often I’d dreamed about being back there.  He said that if I stayed here in the Dreamlands, I could be back there forever.”

“Like Kuranes,” Kylo whispered, to himself as much as to Poe.  “That’s what they told us last night, that he’s tried so hard to recreate his memories here.  He never could get it completely right. . . but I suppose Nyarlathotep can.  If he can destroy this world, he can create whatever he wants here as well.”

Poe tugged on his hands and said, “No!  He _can’t_.  Ben, Emily said that there was something Kuranes had lost that even he could never dream back.  And it’s something Nyarlathotep can’t recreate either.  Before, I didn’t know what it was, but when Nyarlathotep showed me that place— _our_ place, where we’d run off to whenever you came with your mother to visit. . . I understood.”  Poe blinked, dampening his lashes with the wetness that was gathering in his eyes; then he leaned into Kylo and rested his cheek against the larger man’s shoulder.

“We can’t dream back _people_.  I mean, we can dream _about_ people, but we can’t make them really _be_ there.  Kuranes can’t be with his parents or his childhood friends again, and even if I stayed here forever, Nyarlathotep couldn’t give me my mother back.  And he can’t give me _you_.”

“Poe. . . .”  Kylo’s voice sounded deeper and harsher than he meant it to, and he swallowed before continuing, “Poe, do you really want that—to go back to the past?  I thought. . . I thought you never looked back.  You’ve always seemed to love life so much, to live so _hard_.  I—I would stay here with you, forever, if that’s what you wanted.  But is it, really?”

“No, of course it isn’t,” Poe mumbled against Kylo’s shoulder.  “And it’s not what you want either.  You wouldn’t stay here with me, and if you did, you’d hate it—you’d resent me for it.”

“Poe!  I _would_ stay, I—”  He broke off when Poe pulled away from him, even letting go of his hands.  Poe scrubbed the heels of his own palms over his eyes and smeared away the tears.

“Let’s say you did, it still wouldn’t be the same as it was back then.  We’ve both changed too much for that,” Poe said.  Now he looked away from Kylo, towards one of the posters of the bed.  “Yeah, sometimes I dream about what we had, I miss it, but that doesn’t mean I want it now.  I don’t think Nyarlathotep gets the difference—between missing something and wanting it back.  I think maybe time’s different for him somehow, that he doesn’t know a past or a future.  For him, something is, or it isn’t.  It’s here, or it’s not.  So if something’s not here and he wants it, he thinks all he has to do is. . . is make it _be_ here.  But things aren’t that simple.”

Kylo frowned and tried not to show his impatience; he didn’t care to debate Nyarlathotep’s perception of time just then.  Somehow, Poe knew he was frowning without even looking right at him— _He always did understand me so well,_ Kylo thought with a bit of resentment—and he scowled too.

“So I told him no,” Poe muttered.  “I told him I didn’t want to—to _die_ like Kuranes did so I could live here instead.”  Poe chewed on his lip a moment, then finally looked at Kylo again.  “Is that what you meant when you said he wanted to kill me?  Because he didn’t act like he wanted _that_ , it was almost the opposite.  Like he wanted me to stay. . . where he was.”  The crease appeared between his brows which always showed when Poe was puzzled about something, like he had only just then realized that Nyarlathotep might have a personal interest in him.  Kylo’s jealousy flared brighter than ever.

“No, when I first met him, he said he was going to destroy you.  That he wouldn’t spare you like I did,” Kylo growled.

“You _spared_ me,” Poe repeated with what sounded to Kylo like infinite disdain.  “I never thanked you for that, did I?  For letting me live after your troopers beat the hell out of me and you ripped the thoughts out of my head.”

Kylo groaned, “Poe—” but the other man cut him off again.

“He didn’t say anything about destroying me.”

Kylo snapped, “He changed his mind!  I saw him last night too, and he said he changed his mind.”  When Poe continued to watch him skeptically, Kylo muttered, “Do you think I’d lie to you?”

“I don’t know,” said Poe.  He got up from the bed and began to dress; Kylo only saw his bare, tanned body for a moment before Poe pulled his pants on.  Kylo bit back an angry retort and arose as well.  For perhaps the first time, he understood that anger would only make the situation worse.  Poe shrugged into his jacket before looking up at him.

“I want to talk to Kuranes again,” Poe said.  “Emily said something about him and Nyarlathotep—that Kuranes was the only one to get away from him, or something like that.  I want to ask him how.”

Kylo did not want Kuranes’s help, and he certainly didn’t want Emily’s—especially if she truly was the same kind of being as Nyarlathotep himself.  But he had to admit that he had no ideas of his own about how to escape the deity and keep him from striking again the very next time Poe slept.  Kylo acquiesced with a nod.  Poe looked surprised; then he gave Kylo a tentative smile and murmured, “Thank you.”

“Poe,” Kylo whispered, and he held his hand out to the other man.  The thought of losing Poe a second time felt unbearable at that moment, especially losing him to someone like—

_Nyarlathotep destroyed my grandfather, deliberately broke him down just to see if he could reshape himself, just like he destroyed Serannian so Emily could recreate it.  He manipulated Grandfather, and he manipulated me, and if he dares to do the same to Poe—_   Kylo suppressed his growing rage a second time, but without the anger, all he felt was misery, misery and aching loneliness.  He reached for Poe with both arms.

“Poe, _please_ ,” he rasped.  “I need you.”

“Ben!”  Poe said his name with a degree of wonder; then he was in Kylo’s arms, wrapping the larger man in his own embrace, and holding him tightly.  He whispered against Kylo’s shoulder, “You never said that before, _never_. . . and you’ve said it twice, here.”

“It is true,” Kylo told him.  He held Poe around the shoulders with one arm and put his other hand into Poe’s hair.  “It’s always been true, but it’s hard to say.  It’s so hard to say. . . .”

Ever argumentative, Poe countered, “It’s not so hard.”  He raised up on his toes to put his lips against Kylo’s ear and whisper, “I need you too, Ben.  I need you, and when you left me, it felt like my heart had been ripped out.  I know it’s gonna be different out there, when we wake up. . . but for now, you’ve given it back to me.”

Kylo didn’t want to think about “out there,” everything that would matter again when he awoke.  What would his new knowledge, that his and his grandfather’s prescient dreams had all been instilled by some bored eldritch abomination, mean for the First Order?  _It **doesn’t** matter right now,_ Kylo decided.  _Right now, all that matters is Poe._

Kylo turned his face toward Poe’s to kiss him and mumble, “I love you,” into his mouth.  Poe kissed him back hard, clutching at his hair and neck.  When their frantic kisses finally slowed, Poe dropped back down to stand flat on his feet and laid his head against Kylo’s chest.  Kylo stroked his back with one hand, feeling the softness of the scuffed leather of Poe’s jacket.

“He asked me how far I would go for you,” Kylo murmured, “to the ‘point of no return’ or beyond it.  I know he was trying to incite me, but I could have answered him—I’ll go as far as I have to.  As far as you need me to.”

“I wish I could believe that,” mumbled Poe into Kylo’s robe.  Kylo couldn’t even be angry about that; what reason had Poe to trust him now, after all?  Kylo rubbed his cheek against Poe’s hair and held him until the smaller man finally drew back, took Kylo’s arm, and turned them both toward the door.

\--

They had breakfast in the same banquet hall where they’d eaten dinner, and again Kylo felt hunger once he smelled the food.  Kuranes sat at the head of the table and smiled at them and everyone else without ever looking truly happy.  Emily wasn’t there, something for which Kylo was grateful.  If Poe wanted to talk to Kuranes, better they do it without _her_.

The king seemed willing enough to meet with them again privately; he took them back to the throne room amidst all his books where he sat in the same chair as before.  Kylo and Poe retook their place on the settee, Poe on the side closest to Kuranes.

“What did you want to speak with me about?” Kuranes asked Poe.

Poe swallowed—watching him, Kylo saw the shift of his throat—and said, “Nyarlathotep.”

“Oh,” breathed Kuranes.  “Perhaps you’d do better to see Emily.  She knows far more about—”

Poe interrupted, “No!” then swallowed again and added as an apology, “Your majesty.”  Kuranes shook his head with what was almost a grimace.

“No,” he echoed, “please.  Call me by my name.”

“Kuranes,” said Poe, “we need to know what you can tell us.  She said something about you, that you were the only one to face Nyarlathotep and live?”

Kuranes lifted his hands in a sort of shrugging gesture.  “Not exactly, but—well, first: why do you need to know about him?  Because he touched. . . you?”  He aimed the word at Kylo.

Kylo said, “No.”  He hesitated, then decided to tell him everything, or almost.  Everything but Anakin Skywalker’s dreams.

“Two nights ago, I dreamed about Nyarlathotep destroying Serannian,” muttered Kylo.  “I watched him do it, sending his crawling mist out to destroy the island, and I saw the airships trying to defend it.  Poe was on one of those airships, and I couldn’t protect him.”  He was aware of Poe watching him, but he focused his attention on Kuranes.  Somehow, now that they were back in the throne room with Kuranes’s expressive grey eyes fixed on him, Kylo felt Poe had made the right decision about coming to him for help.

“Nyarlathotep told me he was going to kill Poe, that I could not save him unless I begged Nyarlathotep to spare him.”  Kylo scowled, wondering again how Nyarlathotep dared to call _him_ arrogant.  “But then, last night, I dreamed about him again, and he said he’d changed his mind.  Now he wants to keep Poe here in the Dreamlands, instead.  Forever.”

“He told me the same thing,” Poe spoke up.  “He said I could only know true happiness _here_ —where he could give me back my past, and everything else I’d lost.”  He closed his eyes briefly, long black lashes hiding the intense gaze that haunted Kylo’s ordinary dreams, then opened them and fixed them on Kuranes.  “But he’s lying, isn’t he?  You can’t get your past back here, and neither can I, because it’s not the _places_ where we grew up that matter.”

Kuranes gave Poe a tender smile full of utter misery, and he reminded Kylo of his uncle Luke more strongly than ever.

“In the world where I come from,” he said to Poe, “there is a rather famous little poem whose first line goes, ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant.’  And that is exactly what Nyarlathotep does: there is almost always some grain of truth at the heart of what he says, but he conceals it in such layers of misdirection that one usually takes him to mean whatever one _wants_ him to mean.  Poe, it took me a long time to come to understand what _you_ understand after one brief encounter with him.”

Kylo felt the old sting of envy he had experienced since he and Poe were boys, when Poe always outshone him in every way—in looks, talent, personality—and others constantly overlooked Kylo in favor of the other boy.

“But as for what you said, that I am the only one to have faced Nyarlathotep and lived.  That isn’t how it happened.”  Kuranes sighed and shifted in his chair to look out a window to his right, which opened onto a view of the streets below and the glimmer of the ocean far beyond.

The king continued, “When I first visited the Dreamlands, before I came to stay here forever, I was quite the explorer.  I tried over and over to make my way to Celephaïs, a city I had dreamed of as a boy.  I went all over the dream world but could not find my city, and so, I’m rather ashamed to admit, I resorted to using intoxicants to force myself to sleep so I could dream more.  With the dubious aid of one such substance, I dreamed myself out of this universe entirely.  Out in that place beyond, matter as we know it does not exist, not even in the way it exists here in the Dreamlands.  Even so, I could see living beings who looked like great clouds of the most beautiful colors you could imagine, and beyond them. . . .”

His eyes remained fixed on the window, but Kylo doubted they were seeing it.  Kuranes’s face had paled, and his voice sounded like a husk of disgust and revulsion when he finished his sentence.

“. . . I saw Azathoth.”

“Azathoth,” Poe muttered, as if the very word made him as uncomfortable as Kuranes’s ramblings of a place beyond the universe clearly had.  “You said that’s Nyarlathotep’s. . . father, was it?”

Kuranes nodded.  “Yes, as far as the concept of ‘father’ applies to such beings.  From what I understand, he created Nyarlathotep to speak for him, since Azathoth is too far gone to communicate with any but his own kind.  Anyhow, as horrible as he is, I felt compelled to draw closer to him, and I might have done so and been lost forever, had one of the cloud beings not stopped me.”

Finally, the king turned from the window and smiled at them again, and finally, his smile seemed to be warmed with true, glad emotion.

“Her name was—well, was and still is, S’ngac.  She is violet, or at least violet is the closest word I have to describe her color, and like all the cloud beings, she has devoted herself to knowledge and study.  She was very kind to me, despite having never met any matter-based creatures before.  She told me all about the place I had come to, and Azathoth, and why I must never approach him.”

“Why?” Kylo interjected testily.  He was not particularly interested in Azathoth, and not at all interested in talking clouds.  Again like Luke, Kuranes seemed overly fond of story-telling.  However, Kylo wished he hadn’t pressed Kuranes once the king answered him, for the man’s face lost its joy to darken with misery again.

“Because Azathoth is the Nuclear Chaos,” Kuranes said, “the Crimson King, the Heart of Darkness.  Because if I were to venture close enough to get sucked into his orbit and to fall into his void, my mind would have been shattered, and I could never have returned.  Nyarlathotep, at least, knows how to put on his disguises that allow us mortals to look upon him.  Azathoth has no such pretensions, and if you ever get close enough to truly see him, he will break your sanity.”

Beside Kylo, Poe shuddered, and his fingers twitched against Kylo’s own.  As before, Kylo closed his large hand over Poe’s smaller one, and Poe clutched it.

“S’ngac told me that I should return to the material universe and not venture beyond it again, but that it was not safe to make the journey on my own,” Kuranes continued.  “She herself cannot leave her place, so she said she must call a guide for me—Nyarlathotep.  But first S’ngac warned me that he could not be trusted, and she told me terrible things about him.  She said not to listen to anything he said to me, for he would try to convince me to turn back toward Azathoth and the other Outer Gods.”  He stopped and frowned, then sighed heavily.

“Then S’ngac called Nyarlathotep to her and asked him to escort me back to reality.  He smiled—he had chosen a very handsome avatar, that time—and said he would, and he took my hand.”  The corner of Kuranes’s lined mouth twitched in a mirthless smirk as he said, “And then as soon as we were out of the range of S’ngac’s perception, out of her sight as it were, he let go.  Of course.  Nyarlathotep knew S’ngac would warn me not to listen to him, and so although he loves to trick mortals with his pretty words, he didn’t bother trying.  He just threw me right into the void.  And _that_ is likely what he means to do to you, when he says he’ll keep you here forever, Poe.”

Poe had leaned forward, absorbed in the tale as Kylo was not, and now he collapsed against the settee’s back with a soft thump.

“So you see he isn’t lying,” Kuranes added.  “He might even make you believe you’re back in your longed-for past, at least until Azathoth destroys your ability to think at all.  But Nyarlathotep is certainly ‘telling it slant.’”

“But how did you make it back?” Poe asked in a hoarse voice, as if he didn’t want to cope with Nyarlathotep’s plans for him just yet.

“Emily,” said Kuranes.  “She caught my hand not even a heartbeat after Nyarlathotep let it go, and even then, it was almost too late.  She brought me up from the void and forced me to awake back in my world.  And then. . . then I immediately went out and bought more drugs so I could dream again.”  He shook his head.  “I’d like to say I was young and foolish, but I wasn’t so young by then. . . only foolish.  I suppose I still am.”

“How does that help _us_?” Kylo muttered.  “We can’t just get _her_ to wake us up—Nyarlathotep will just come after us again, the next time we sleep.  He hates me because of who I am, and he wants to hurt me by taking Poe.  He won’t give up so easily.”  Poe glared at Kylo for his rudeness yet did not release his hand, and Kuranes didn’t seem to be offended.

Calmly, he agreed, “I know my situation was very different.  I annoy Nyarlathotep by being a mortal—or a former mortal, I suppose—with such abilities to dream.  But I amuse him as well, and he doesn’t see me as particularly. . . audacious.  He tolerates me.  I have a friend, though, my only friend here from my own world.  His name is Randolph Carter, and like me, he now dwells permanently in the Dreamlands.  His city is called Ilek-Vad, should you ever find yourselves there.  Anyhow, Carter is very dear to me, but he’s a stubborn ass, and you remind me of him quite a bit.”  Kuranes directed this last to Kylo, who glowered.

Poe laughed and said, “If he’s a stubborn ass, that sounds about right.”  Kylo decided he could tolerate the name-calling just to hear Poe’s laughter break into his somber mood.

Even Kuranes chuckled, then went on, “Like me, Carter dreamed of a beautiful city in his youth and pursued it, but he wanted far more than that and the land of his past.  His adventures would take too long to relate, but suffice it to say that Nyarlathotep finds him very audacious indeed, because Carter has sought such great knowledge and power—and because Carter dared to challenge him as I did not.”

Despite his reluctance to get Kuranes started on another tale, Kylo wanted to know more about the man Kuranes said was like him.  He breathed, “What did he do?”

“Carter faced Nyarlathotep,” said Kuranes, “faced him down in his own citadel and demanded Nyarlathotep hand over control of the city of his dreams.  Nyarlathotep told him some romantic story about how our world’s gods had taken up residence in Carter’s city, and sent him off to convince them to return to their home.  But as I said, Nyarlathotep tells his truths slant-wise, and as soon as Carter set out on his journey, Nyarlathotep flung him into the void as he did me.  And yet—Carter defied him.”

When he said those words, Kuranes’s eyes gleamed, and again he smiled with true pleasure.  Clearly, he admired and cared for Randolph Carter, and Kylo wondered why, if Carter was so dear to him, they did not live together in the Dreamlands.  Then he thought about Poe and himself, and remembered that things were often not so simple.

Kuranes was continuing, “Nyarlathotep had put Carter upon the back of a flying steed and set the creature off toward the void and his father Azathoth, and when Carter realized this, he had no help as I did, no Emily to pull him back to reality.  He was far braver than I could ever be, and he leapt from the steed’s back and plunged into the blackness of the space around him.

“Carter made his way back all on his own, although S’ngac and others who hate Nyarlathotep showed him the way.  He woke up in our own world, and even when he dreamed again, Nyarlathotep no longer had any power over him.  To defeat the Crawling Chaos once is to render him impotent against you forever.”

“So we have to face him,” Kylo murmured, “not in the dreams he gives us, but here in the Dreamlands, like Carter did.”

“And the airships,” said Poe abruptly, “the airships that stood against him when he attacked Serannian.  They defeated him too.”

The king nodded and regarded them with some sympathy.  “Yes.  And to face Nyarlathotep of your own will is to risk losing everything.  It was only the very strength of Carter’s will, and the help of S’ngac and her allies, that saved Carter. . . as Emily’s help saved the airships.”

_I don’t need her help,_ Kylo thought, though he kept the opinion to himself, _hers, or a talking cloud’s or anyone one’s.  I only need Poe, and I’ll save him myself._   Kuranes watched him as if he could see Kylo’s thoughts, even there in a world where the Force held no power, but the king said nothing more until Kylo asked his final question.

“Where is Nyarlathotep?  Where is the citadel where Carter faced him?”

“To the north, in the mountains past the plateau of Leng,” Kuranes replied.  “Nyarlathotep’s citadel sits nestled amidst those mountains.  He calls it Kadath.”  He smiled his sad little smile and added, “You’re going there, aren’t you?”

Poe surprised Kylo by muttering, “We have to, we don’t have a choice.  We have to beat Nyarlathotep before we wake up. . . while we’re still together.”

“I see.  You two are apart in the waking realm?” Kuranes asked them gently.  “Then I hope you can find happiness together here in the Dreamlands.”  He stood up and put a hand on each of their shoulders.  Even Kylo allowed it, and Kuranes soon turned away from them and went to the window instead.

“Emily can show you the way to Kadath,” he said.  “You’ll likely find her just outside the city this time of morning, watching the ships sail up to the harbor.”

“Thank you,” Poe told the king as he got up from the settee, still holding Kylo’s hand.  Kylo followed him to the wood-paneled door of the modest throne room, but then Poe paused and looked back at the king of Serannian and Celephaïs, the only mortal to gaze at Azathoth and take Nyarlathotep’s hand without going mad.  With his slightly stooped back to them, Kuranes just looked like a small, tired, and lonely man.

“Maybe you should go visit your friend,” Poe suggested to him.  “I bet he misses you as much as you miss him.”

“I wonder,” Kuranes murmured, very softly.  Then he turned to face them and smiled.  “Good luck to both of you. . . and I hope you can return to Serannian someday.”

“I hope we can too,” said Poe.

\--

To be continued


	8. Chapter 8

“I think that, even if we forget each other, we'll remember in our dreams.”  
\--Stephen King, _IT_

\--

They walked through Serannian in silence until they came to the inn where they had slept two nights before.  As they went, Kylo wondered if he would ever be able to find his way back to the city he had searched for, for so long.  Or would Poe be the one to return, without him?

 _Probably,_ Kylo thought.  _He’s always been so lucky. . . ._

Kylo lost that train of thought when they reached the inn, and Poe kept walking past it with only a glance at the empty patio.  Yet Kylo stopped, because for the first time since Poe had yelled at him the night before, he remembered the little plant-like creature who had been so fond of him for no reason that he could discern.

 _She liked me best,_ Kylo remembered, **_me_** _, not Poe.  He said she loved me, and now I’m going to disappear, likely never to return, without ever saying goodbye._

“Goodbye” was hard, and Kylo had disappeared from many other lives without saying it, including the life of the man now at his side.  Kylo told himself, _It will be easier for me if I walk on without seeing her one more time, and probably easier for her too.  She’s only a child, and she’ll forget me soon enough, just like everyone else did until I became someone unforgettable._   But he thought about her large reddish-brown eyes ( _the same color as Poe’s,_ Kylo realized), the way she had nuzzled his hand until he stroked her velvety leaves, how her small voice had sounded when she said his name: _Ben, no leave. . . ._

 _My name. . . ._   The thought shook Kylo from his reverie, and he found that he stood before the inn door with one hand resting on it as if about to knock.  _That isn’t my name.  Not anymore.  Yet I’ve let everyone here call me “Ben,” and it sounded so right when she said it.  It sounds so right when Poe says it. . . ._   There in the Dreamlands, without the Force, without his masks and weapons and armies, he really was just Ben Solo.  Fragile, worthless Ben Solo whom everyone overlooked or forgot.  Yet in Serannian, he had been the guest of a king, he had faced the Crawling Chaos without fear, and he had held Poe Dameron in his arms and made love to him.  After years of trying to forget what it was like to be Ben Solo, now he struggled to remember what it was like to be Kylo Ren.

“Ben?”  Poe’s voice came from right beside him, and Kylo jumped.  He looked down at the smaller man who had turned and come back to him when Kylo stopped before the inn door.

Poe put his hand on Kylo’s shoulder and asked, “Are you all right?”  Kylo curled his fingers against the door’s surface and willed himself to step away, but instead, he shook his head.

“I. . . I need to go in.  I forgot something,” he muttered.  Poe’s brow furrowed, but he nodded.

Kylo pushed the door open and went inside with Poe following.  The tavern was as empty of patrons as when the two left it the day before, and at first, Kylo did not even see the object of his search.  But then he realized she was perched on the polished wood bar, dozing amidst the greenery of a floral arrangement.  In spite of the seriousness of their situation, Kylo smiled.

When he went over to the bar and tugged on one of the large leaves on the sprout’s head, she jerked awake and blinked her large eyes up at him.  Kylo thought she might be angry with him for disappearing, but she trilled, “ _Ben!_ ” and leapt at his chest with such force, he took a step backward as he caught her.

“Where?” the sprout demanded as she nuzzled his chest.  “Where?”  Kylo heard a chuckle from behind him and glanced back at Poe, who was watching the exchange with amusement.

“We spent the night in the palace,” Kylo explained while the small creature kneaded his chest with her paws.

“Ooh,” cooed the sprout.  “Stay now?”  She looked up at him with both trust and contentment on her odd face, and Kylo felt like he betrayed her when he shook his head.

“N-no, I—we have to go.  We have to go to Kadath.”  He stroked her leaves with one hand and cradled the other beneath her bulb-shaped body to support it.  “I’m sorry.”

“Why?”  Kylo didn’t know how to answer her question in any way that she would understand, but when he looked back at Poe again, the other man offered no help.  He only shrugged.

Kylo told her, “We’re in danger, and we have to go there to fight—to fight a monster.  To stop him.”

“Then come back?” she prompted.

“If we can.  But I don’t know.”  She continued to watch him with eyes now wide and serious, and Kylo stammered his worst fear: “We might—we might lose.  He might. . . .”  He couldn’t finish.  Nyarlathotep might what?  Might kill them, might drive them mad?  The full enormity and absurdity of what they were about to do struck Kylo for the first time.

 _I’m asleep,_ Kylo thought, _asleep and dreaming that Poe Dameron and I are together, that Poe still loves me and that some **thing** wants to hurt him.  That we’re going off to fight it with no weapons, no Force, nothing but our own stubbornness.  It’s all just a dream, a ridiculous dream, and none of it’s real._

“Ben?” chirped the sprout, and he thought, _But what if it **is**?_   If it was real and Kylo didn’t believe in it, if he woke up without stopping Nyarlathotep, Poe might never wake up at all.

He hugged the plant creature to his chest and whispered against her leaves, “I don’t know if I can ever come back to Serannian, but I’ll try.”

“Come back,” she replied with conviction.  “See me again.”  Kylo nodded although he lacked her confidence; then he set her back down on the bar.  He was about to turn and leave her, but one more thought occurred to him.

“Do you have a name?” he asked.

“Lis!”  At first, Kylo thought the noise she made was just a cheerful squeak, but then he understood it was her name.

“All right,” he said.  “Goodbye, Lis.”

She waved a stubby paw and toddled back into the nest she’d made among the arrangement of greenery, where she closed her eyes again.

“You wanted to come back here to say goodbye to her?” Poe asked after he followed Kylo out of the tavern and back into the golden sunlight shining on Serannian’s streets.  There was little point in trying to lie, so Kylo nodded.  Poe continued, “Why did you ask what her name was?  I mean, it was nice of you, but why now?”

“I don’t know,” muttered Kylo.  He thought, _Maybe knowing her name will make it easier to make it back to where she is,_ but he didn’t want to say it to Poe.  It sounded too silly and sentimental.

They passed out of the city through the same gate by which they’d entered, crossing the moat over the little arched bridge with its iridescent cobblestones.  Kylo felt as if a lifetime had gone by since they’d last been there, even though the area looked exactly the same: a grassy expanse with cloud-lined edges some distance from them on either side, beyond and below which lay the greenish ocean.  The scene only differed from before in that no airships floated overhead, and Emily stood nearby with her childish face turned toward the city on the side where the harbor lay.  It was inside the city walls, but even from outside, they could see a pathway of rosy clouds stretching downward from the harbor to the ocean below like a river flowing downstream.  A galleon sailed upward against the cloud-current, and Emily watched its approach.

“That’s the Cerenerian Sea down there,” Emily said without looking round at them.  “The ship coming in sailed from Celephaïs—one arrives every few days.  Airship travel is faster, but the galleons don’t complain about carrying heavy loads.”  She smiled as she said it.

“They’re really alive then?  The airships?” ventured Poe.  He left Kylo’s side and approached the girl, but his eyes fixed on the ship beyond her, sailing up the clouds like they were so much water.  “I dreamed about one last night, and it—he talked to me, but. . . uh, where I come from, our space- and aircraft don’t talk, so I thought maybe it really was just a dream.”

“Oh, no.  They’re alive,” said Emily.  Kylo glared at the two of them standing there side by side, Poe not that much taller than the girl, then stalked over to join them.  Poe was grinning.

“Wow, that would be so—so _awesome_.  See, I’m a pilot, but we have to use droids as navigators, you know, unless we have living—erm, organic beings to do it.  But if the craft _itself_ was alive, if it could think. . . _wow!_ ”  Poe turned to look back at Kylo, still smiling, and even Kylo couldn’t stay too annoyed in the face of Poe’s enthusiasm. “I didn’t tell you about that part of the dream, but it was before I saw Nyarlathotep.  This—this blimp thing was telling me all about what it’s like to fly, and I wished. . .  I wished I could fly like _that_.”  He stopped, smile fading as he bit his lip in thought.

“Like what?” Kylo prompted after a few seconds.  Poe’s eyes flicked up to meet his, surprised that Kylo had shown any interest in what he was saying.

“Well, like an airship,” Poe murmured.  “Just in my own body, without being in an X-Wing or something.  I wish I could fly.”  He turned to face Kylo straight on, Emily forgotten for the moment, and murmured, “You probably can now with the Force, can’t you?  You’ve probably gotten strong enough to do it.”

“Uh, it doesn’t work quite like that,” protested Kylo, “I can’t just float around like a—a blimp.”  Poe snickered, and Kylo was glad to see his wistful expression dissolve into the laughter.

“Well, what good are you, then?” Poe chuckled.  “I was gonna sit on your back and ride you like a magic carpet.”

When Kylo retorted, “You never did treat me with any dignity,” Poe laughed harder and abruptly stepped forward to throw his arms around Kylo’s shoulders and hug him tightly.  Kylo’s eyes went wide; then he embraced Poe in return.  The playful, affectionate banter was just like what they’d shared long ago, and Kylo savored the moment he held Poe against him.

Then Emily asked Poe, “You said you dreamed about Nyarlathotep?” and he pulled away from Kylo’s arms.

“Yeah,” Poe said.  “That’s why we came to find you.  Kuranes said we have to face Nyarlathotep if he’s ever going to leave us alone, and that you could take us to find him at Kadath.”

Emily swung to face him with a hard glare in her odd, lavender eyes.  “Kuranes volunteered me to take you to _Kadath_?”

As Poe blinked and even drew back from her slightly, Kylo said, “He didn’t say you’d _take_ us, but that you would show us the way there.  All we ask is that you tell us how to get there.”

Emily’s eyes darted from Poe’s face to Kylo’s, then back again.  She still looked angry, but already resignation crept into her glare. . . and perhaps, Kylo thought, even a touch of fear.

“Please,” Poe added, giving her the wide-eyed, pleading look that had always proved so effective at getting him what he wanted.  “We’ll find a boat or an airship to take us, if you can just tell us where to go!”

“Hmph, no ship captain will take you there,” Emily retorted, “nor will any airship, if they know what’s good for them.  They’d fall right out of the sky before they reached Kadath.”  She turned away and pointed out past the city, over the ocean.

“Kadath is that way, at the northernmost pole of this world.  To reach it, you must sail the Cerenarian to Sarkomand, then cross the plateau of Leng and climb into the mountains.  You would never survive the climb— _if_ you survived Leng.  And to say that you could even reach Leng assumes that the priest Hastur would allow you to pass through his accursed temple to Nyarlathotep at Sarkomand.”

Poe waved off the litany of strange names and protested, “But Kuranes said Randolph Carter had been there!”

Emily looked over her shoulder at him and said flatly, “Kuranes thinks Randolph Carter hung the moon of this world, and that of their own besides.  Yes, Carter has been to Kadath, but Kuranes wouldn’t tarnish his glory by mentioning that it took an entire army of monsters to help him get there.  And then after Nyarlathotep grew bored of watching their struggle, he whisked the monsters away before he sent Carter hurtling out into the void.”

“Was it a lie then, what he said Carter did?” Kylo demanded.  Emily sighed and turned back to them, shaking her head so that her pink hair tumbled around her face.

“No, if he told you that Carter ultimately outwitted Nyarlathotep, that is true.  And since then, Nyarlathotep has let Carter be, him and Kuranes both.  My point is only that you’ll never reach Kadath on your own.”  She sighed again, and to Kylo’s amazement, her stubborn child’s face softened as she said, “I’ll take you there, if that’s what you really want.  But make _sure_ it’s what you want.”  Poe opened his mouth, probably to assure her that it was, but she cut him off by lifting one slender bare hand in a shushing gesture.

“Let me show you first,” she said.  “Let me show you where you are going, and how you will go there.”

Poe closed his mouth again and frowned, the familiar wrinkle of puzzlement between his brows.  He looked over at Kylo, then shrugged.

Emily dropped her hand, closed her eyes, and changed.

After what Nyarlathotep had said— _I am what she is_ —Kylo halfway expected the girl to become, slowly, a slithering mass of tentacles and eyeballs.  Yet she transformed instantly without any intermediate state, into something beautiful albeit utterly foreign even to Kylo Ren who had seen so many different lifeforms across the galaxy.  She was bright with pinkish-white light he could hardly bear to look at head-on, and although she had been short as a girl, now she seemed very large.

“What. . . ,” Poe started to say, then fell silent.  Kylo wouldn’t have known how to answer his question, because he didn’t know what Emily had become.  She looked like nothing organic; instead, the only analogy Kylo could make was to something gemological: a gigantic cube-shaped crystal, longer on every side than he was tall, with glimmering facets all over that refracted the sunlight of the Dreamlands while simultaneously emitting her own light.  Yet that analogy fell far short of explaining how she truly looked.  Something about her looked _wrong_ , the way Nyarlathotep had as a tentacled beast even though she appeared as beautiful as he had appeared ugly.  She rotated slowly in the air over the grassy ground like a giant, iridescent pink diamond, and Kylo hated the sight of her.

Emily offered them no explanation for what she had become; Kylo supposed that if she truly was like Nyarlathotep, she too must have a thousand forms and a thousand names.  She stilled her rotation, and a ray of her light extended from one face of her cubic body, running parallel to the moat surrounding the city.  From this ray, Emily projected a hologram into the air: an image of a monstrous, sprawling, turreted castle that looked to be made of black glass.

“That is Kadath,” she said.  Her voice sounded the same as it had before, except it now had a slightly echoed quality to it, and it issued from somewhere within her crystalline body.  She whispered as if to herself, “Kadath in the cold waste hath known them, and what man knows Kadath?”

Then the hologram, or the projection, or whatever it was, changed.  Now they looked upon an interior room, but it was the largest room even Kylo had ever seen.  The ceiling and walls were so distant from the point of view Emily presented, Kylo could hardly make them out.  Mist—mist eerily like that which Nyarlathotep had used to destroy Serannian—curled along the floor and reached tendrils up into the air.

“Well?” Emily asked after a moment.  Slightly behind Kylo, Poe drew in his breath, and Kylo looked over at whatever the girl had become.  With no face to look at, he resorted to glaring into the general vicinity of her middle.

“Well _what_?”

“Are you going?” she prompted.  “Or aren’t you?”  Kylo felt Poe’s hand close over his shoulder, and Kylo reached up to cover it with his own.

Poe asked carefully, “Going where?  To that room you’re showing us?”

“The throne room of Kadath,” clarified Emily, “the uppermost room in the tallest tower.”

“Then yes.  We want to go there,” Poe told her.  “Will you take us?”

The pink-white light Emily emitted took on a sharper quality, as if conveying impatience, and she muttered, “That’s what I’m offering.  Go on, if you’re going.”

Kylo stared at her, then at the hologram.  “Into—into there, into the. . . projection?”

But before Emily had a chance to answer, Poe whispered to him, “It’s. . . it’s not a projection, not a hologram.  It’s a—a _gateway_.”  Kylo heard something click in Poe’s throat as he swallowed hard.  “What _is_ she, Ben?”

Kylo didn’t know how to answer that, so he turned to Poe and asked instead, “Do you trust her?  Nyarlathotep told me that she is the same race as he is.  Perhaps he was lying, but I don’t think so, not after what Kuranes told us about her, and not after seeing. . . this.”  He gestured at Emily with his free hand, his other still clasping Poe’s.

Poe repeated Kuranes’s words, “‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant.’  Maybe she _is_ the same race, but that doesn’t mean she’s the same _kind_.  I trust her, Ben.  I guess I _have_ to trust her, if going to Kadath is the only way to stop Nyarlathotep.”  Poe reached up his hand toward Kylo’s cheek.  It hovered beside the larger man’s face, quivering; then his fingertips rested against Kylo’s skin.

“Ben, I’ll go on alone,” Poe murmured.  “He’s after me, so I’m the one who needs to face him.”

“No—” Kylo protested, although Poe was still talking.

“You can wake up, and you’ll be safe—”

“Dammit, Poe, I’m not leaving you to go after Nyarlathotep by yourself!” Kylo interrupted with a snarl.  He clasped Poe’s free hand in his and held it against his cheek.  “Maybe the Resistance lets you risk your life to flaunt what an altruistic hero you are, but I _won’t_.”

“Ugh, it’s not about me being a hero,” groaned Poe.  “Ben, you idiot, I _love_ you.  I don’t you to get hurt because of me.”

“If Nyarlathotep or—or that pink bitch, or whoever, tosses you into some void, I’m going with you, because _I_ love _you_!”  Kylo dragged Poe’s hand to his lips and kissed it with his eyes pressed closed; then he dropped it, though he kept hold of Poe’s other hand.  He turned back to Emily and the vision she projected.

“Ben,” whispered Poe.

“All right, we’re going,” Kylo said to Emily.  He hesitated; then although the words pained him, he muttered, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she replied.  “Now go.  I’ll follow you.”

Kylo hadn’t expected that, and he wasn’t sure if he felt better or worse for it.  He nodded and approached Emily’s ray of light with Poe beside him.  The projection of the throne room at Kadath wavered slightly when they stood close to it, and Kylo couldn’t quite believe that they wouldn’t just pass right through it as they would a hologram.  But when Poe squeezed his hand and stepped into Emily’s light, Kylo went with him.

And Poe was right: whatever she was, Emily had opened a gateway between Serannian’s city wall and Kadath’s throne room.  In one step, Kylo and Poe moved from the island’s warm morning sunshine into cool, still, misty dimness.  Kylo’s boots made a muted “clack” sound on the floor, which looked to be marble cut into tiles forming a jagged, zig-zagged pattern of alternating black and white.  The room was as vast as it had appeared in Emily’s projection; the vaulted ceiling and onyx-bricked walls seemed impossibly far away.

For an instant after their arrival, Emily’s light cast soft pools on the floor around them, but then it went out.  Kylo looked over his shoulder, expecting that she had abandoned them after all.  She was there, a young girl again instead of the glaringly bright crystal thing.  Whatever invisible light source illuminated the throne room was either weak or mostly obscured by mist.  Beside Kylo, Poe appeared washed out, and Emily looked all but colorless.  Her hair was no longer pink but grey, and her eyes looked like silver.  Her lips pursed into the mournful frown she’d given the very first time Kylo had spoken of the Crawling Chaos.

 _Nyarlathotep makes her sad,_ Kylo realized.  For the first time, he considered that she felt the same emotions that he felt, him or Poe or any other ordinary mortal.  Staring at her, he wondered, _And what about Nyarlathotep, if he’s like her?  Or did the circumstances of his birth, his heritage as Azathoth’s son and slave, leave him unable to feel anything, or to care about anything but himself?  Is he what I tried to be?_

Emily’s eyes had met Kylo’s when he looked back, but now they shifted to stare past both him and Poe.  Kylo too turned to face Nyarlathotep’s approach.

He came alone, walking toward them at a leisurely pace with his narrow hips shifting slightly beneath the robe he wore.  Despite the dimness of the throne room, that robe appeared brilliantly white and sometimes shifted into a spectrum of color as it had in Kylo’s dreams of him.  Nyarlathotep looked tall and slender and very handsome, with just two arms and no tentacles at all.  He almost seemed approachable, except for the amusement in his eyes and the faint smile on his delicate mouth.  The amusement was mocking instead of friendly.

“Kylo Ren.  Poe Dameron,” he said in his mild, languid voice with a nod of greeting.  Then his glittering dark eyes fixed on the girl just behind them.  His voice remained mild and languid, and the smile stayed on his lips, but all amusement fell away from his eyes as he spoke her name.  “Emily.”

“Nyarlathotep,” she replied.  “They asked me to bring them to you.”

“And of course, you couldn’t resist the excuse to meddle in my affairs,” he returned.  When she didn’t reply, he seemed to lose interest in her, and he looked at Kylo instead.

“So.  For someone so affronted at being made an experiment, you’re awfully eager to face me,” Nyarlathotep said.  “Have you finally seen the wisdom of what I said?  Have you brought your Poe to me because you know I’ll take better care of him than you ever could?”

Beside Kylo, Poe bristled and growled, “What?!” but Nyarlathotep ignored him.

“Or have you come here to challenge me?” the deity continued.

“You know why I’ve come here,” Kylo spat.  “For the same reason Randolph Carter came here, and for the same reason the airships faced you above Serannian.  Yes, I’ve come to challenge you.”  At the sound of Carter’s name, the smile dropped from Nyarlathotep’s mouth as it already had from his eyes.  Whatever he felt for Emily, and she for him—hatred, frustration, fascination—he felt it for Carter too.

“You lack the reverence of Randolph Carter, and the innocence of the Serannians,” Nyarlathotep scoffed.  “And you even lack your grandfather’s audacity and arrogance.  As much as I despise those qualities, he used them to become great.  The most _you’ve_ done is snivel about your miserable life, and then utterly fail when given a chance to make it right on either side, the Light _or_ the Dark.  I care little which one you choose, but you can’t claim to have killed the Light in you when you remain so _weak._ ”

“Shut up!”  Kylo jumped at Poe’s bellowed interjection, and he stared at the pilot in amazement while Poe glared up at Nyarlathotep.  “Is that all you do, talk?  And then you think I’d be better off with _you_ than with Ben?  Forget going mad in the void, way before that happened, I’d go crazy with boredom listening to you run your mouth!”

Nyarlathotep stared at Poe too.  Despite Kylo’s concern for Poe’s safety after the outburst, he couldn’t help but savor the bewildered look on the deity’s face.

“And another thing, I’m not some—some prize to be won!” Poe continued ranting.  “You talk about me like I’m not even here, and least Ben’s never done _that_.”  He dropped Kylo’s hand to take a step forward and cried, “And you know what else?  He _hasn’t_ failed!  He still loves me— _he loves me_ , and I love him.  As long as he has love, the Light isn’t dead in him.”

Nyarlathotep began to laugh—hardy yet melodious laughter that didn’t sound like it was meant to mock Poe.  Instead, it sounded. . . what?  _Delighted,_ Kylo thought.  _Almost joyous. . . ._

Poe didn’t seem to hear the laughter at all.  A thoughtful expression passed over his face; then he turned to Kylo and looked up at him instead of Nyarlathotep.

“You still have Light in you, Ben, but I know you still have Dark in you too.  And. . . and that’s all right.  It’s _all right_ , Ben.”  Poe reached up to take Kylo’s face in both hands, and he smiled.  “You don’t have to be all one or the other.  Hardly anyone _can_ be.  Don’t listen to _him_ , because you haven’t failed.  You _won’t_ fail as long as you don’t give up.”

“You really are quite beautiful,” said Nyarlathotep.  Finally, Poe heard him, and his head whipped toward the sound of the deity’s voice—but Nyarlathotep was no longer there.  Now he stood behind Poe, without either of them having moved.  He folded brown, long-fingered hands over Poe’s shoulders; then when Poe tried to cringe away, Nyarlathotep gripped him so tightly, Poe winced.

“Let him go!” Kylo roared, already sick with horror because Nyarlathotep was going to take Poe from him in spite of Kylo facing him without fear, in spite of all the fine things Poe had said.  In spite of love, Chaos always won, and everything fell apart.

“No,” said the Crawling Chaos.

“Nyarlathotep!” shrilled Emily.  Kylo had forgotten her presence entirely, and he hardly noticed her now.  All his attention focused on the man he loved and the monster who came between them.

Nyarlathotep whispered the same words he had shrieked at Kylo in his dream within a dream: “ _Nog lw'nafh ch'shagg syha'h._ ”

He smiled, and Kylo woke up screaming.

\--

To be continued


	9. Chapter 9

When Kylo awoke, he was sitting up in bed, fists clenched into the rough sheets so hard, his fingers ached.  At first, he thought perhaps it had been nothing more than a dream after all, but he continued his enraged screaming nevertheless, until his throat felt too sore to continue.  Then he simply sat, chest heaving, and blinked into the darkness of the small, sparse room where he slept alone each night.  The austerity of his quarters was part of his training, meant to help him clear his mind of distractions, and Kylo had welcomed it .

_But what good did it do me?_ he asked the silent darkness.  _The distractions struck from within me. . . within my dreams._

Kylo unclenched his fingers, flexing them until the cramping ache subsided.  He shoved the sheets aside and put his feet on the floor beside his bed, intending to stand up and shake off the dream.  The dream that had seemed so real, the dream of three days spent in the city where the sea meets the sky.  The dream that Poe still loved him.

He could hear Poe’s voice in his mind: _He loves me, and I love him._   He could see Poe’s eyes and his smile, feel Poe’s hands cupping his face as he said, _You won’t fail as long as you don’t give up._

“It was real,” Kylo whispered aloud, staring down at his bare feet splayed on the cold floor.  His voice grew louder, although there was no one there to hear him: “It was _real!_ ”  The words devolved into a growl of frustration as he finally stood, not to shake off the dream but to lurch across the narrow room toward the chair where he laid out his clothing every night.  As he flung on his clothes, Kylo sorted through what he knew and didn’t know, trying to decipher what he had to do. . . what it meant not to give up.

_What day is it?_ he wondered suddenly.  _How long was I asleep?_   He turned, one leg through his pants and the other bared to the thigh, to consult the clock at his bedside.  _The same day.  The same **night** —I only slept for a few hours._

Kylo stood motionless while his thoughts raced.  He had only slept for a few hours, so the same was likely true for Poe. . . wherever Poe was.  But Poe would still be asleep, he would be asleep _forever_ if Nyarlathotep had told the truth about keeping Poe eternally in the Dreamlands.

Then Kylo thought, _And what if Nyarlathotep sends him to the void where he tried to send Kuranes and Carter?  Then even if Poe could be awakened, his mind would be gone._   That thought was more horrible than the idea of Poe sleeping forever, more horrible than death.  _I have to find him, quickly.  I have to wake him up._

_But how?_

Kylo resumed dressing as he cast about for an answer.  The First Order had had a bounty on Poe Dameron’s head ever since he escaped Kylo’s capture, and if the best bounty hunters in the galaxy hadn’t found Poe in all that time, how could Kylo hope to locate him within a few hours?  He could trust no one to assist him; his helping Poe would be seen as a betrayal of the First Order, and endanger Poe’s life further, besides.

_Can I get access to a computer without anyone knowing?_ Kylo wondered as he sat back down on the bed to pull his boots on.  _The Supreme Leader has watched me so closely and—_

His train of thought dissolved, and he froze again, this time with one boot on and the other clutched in his hand.  In the midst of his thoughts, he had felt something, sensed a presence—but no, “sensed a presence” hardly began to describe it.  The Force screamed inside his head that something, or someone, was there in the room with him.  An intruder who shouldn’t be there.  An intruder who felt _wrong_.

At first when he flung his head to look around, Kylo saw no one, but then a pinprick of light caught his eyes.  It hovered a few inches above the foot of his bed, tiny and very bright.  It pulsed then swelled, and as it grew, Kylo saw that it was not white as he’d first thought.  It was pink.

Kylo swore under his breath and scrambled backwards, away from the light.  One hand extended, he used the Force to draw his lightsaber into it from where the weapon rested next to his bed, even though he knew it would be of no help to him.  The feeling of it in his hand, even deactivated, brought him some small comfort.

The point of light grew larger and pinker, taking on a cubic shape until it stopped growing and just floated there.  The shining crystalline cube could have fit in Kylo’s palm, but otherwise it looked exactly as it had in the Dreamlands.

“Am I still dreaming?” Kylo asked in a low, raspy whisper.  “How can you be here?”

“I shouldn’t be,” said Emily.  Her voice sounded as if it came from a great distance, although he could have reached out and touched her.  “But no, you aren’t dreaming.  I followed you here—someone asked me to, someone helped me, but I can’t stay long.  I’m not strong enough.”

As suspicious as he was of her, Kylo leaned forward and breathed, “Who asked you?  Was it Poe?  Who was it?”

“I don’t know who, but it wasn’t him—it doesn’t matter.”  Emily’s echoing voice grew more urgent, but the intensity of her light had already lessened.  She repeated, “It doesn’t matter.  I can take you to him, but we have to go now.  I can’t stay here long.”

Kylo stared at her for only a second before he scooped up his boot and hurried to put it on, with the lightsaber’s hilt grasped in three fingers.  As soon as he was shod, he jumped to his feet and stood before the glowing cube at the end of his bed.

“Take me,” he hissed.  “I have to help him, I have to wake him up.”

“Are you certain?” asked Emily.  Kylo opened his mouth to snarl at her for wasting time, but she cut him off with an explanation: “Because I can’t bring you back.  Carrying you with me will sap all my energy, and I’ll fall back into the Dreamlands—even Nyarlathotep could never exist in the waking omniverse for long without the great sacrifice of mortals to give him the energy for it.”

“Where is Poe?” Kylo demanded.  “Tell me that first.”  Learning that Nyarlathotep had taken “the sacrifice of mortals” for energy did not surprise Kylo, but it made him trust Emily less all the same.  What if she decided she needed more energy and turned on him—or Poe?

Emily made an impatient-sounding noise but cast a ray of light out from her small form.  It projected a faint, flickering image of a verdant landscape at night, lit by some celestial body either orbiting or orbited by the world Kylo now saw.  Dense trees and foliage fringed the clearing Emily showed him, but Kylo’s eyes fixed only on the center of the image, where Poe lay sleeping.  He seemed to have set up camp in the area, even pitching a tent before apparently deciding to sleep out in the open instead.

“I don’t know your name for that world,” Emily told him, “but he is there.  If you want to go to him, we must go now—I can’t stay here much longer.”

Kylo gazed at Poe’s peaceful, sleeping face.  Poe didn’t look like he was dreaming anything but the most pleasant of dreams, and Kylo wondered a host of questions: Was he truly awake now, and was any of it real?  Was Poe really trapped in his dreams, and would Emily truly take Kylo to him?  Could Kylo even wake him if she did?

And even assuming that it all _was_ real, and he could bring Poe back to reality. . . what would Poe do then?  What if he wasn’t really alone, as he appeared to be?  Even Kylo Ren could be overcome if enough Resistance fighters swarmed him at the same time.  And even if Poe was alone, he might turn on Kylo, love or no love.  Poe’s sense of honor and loyalty to the Resistance might be stronger than whatever he still felt for his old friend and lover, and Kylo didn’t know if he could bear to fight back against Poe, not anymore.

_If I go to him, I’ll be betraying the Supreme Leader, abandoning the First Order. . . turning away from the Dark.  If I go to him, there’s no coming back._

The flickering of Emily’s light had turned to guttering, and she snarled, “Ben!  Choose, _now!_   I can’t—”

_If I don’t go to him, he could be lost forever._

Kylo shoved his lightsaber into the loop on his belt where he carried it, then reached out and closed his hand over Emily.  He couldn’t properly feel her surface, only faint pressure and warmth against his palm and fingers.

“Take me to him!” he hissed.

This time, he didn’t step through a gateway; she _was_ the gateway.  Her light enveloped him, faint though it was, and then he was there: standing in person before Poe Dameron for the first time since Kylo had ripped the thoughts from his mind and left him unconscious.  Both guilt and relief so overwhelmed him, Kylo dropped to his knees beside Poe’s sleeping form.  He released his grip on Emily, who tumbled from his hand like a child’s block and fell onto the thick moss that carpeted the ground.  Kylo didn’t even look at her until she spoke.

“Be careful.”  Kylo could hardly hear her weakened voice.  “What Nyarlathotep said to you as he woke you up.  _Nog lw—lw'nafh ch'sh-shagg syha'h._ ”  She stumbled over the revolting, guttural words.

Kylo had already grasped Poe’s arm in both hands before he looked over at her and asked, “What did he say?  What does it mean?”

“‘Come dream,’” Emily whispered.  “‘C-come dream and—and cross over into the. . . Dreamlands.  Forever.’  He wants—”  Before she could finish, she shrunk back to a pinpoint of light, but now it was so faint as to be nearly invisible.  When Emily did really disappear, Kylo did not have the impression of her light going out.  Instead, it was as if she had simply shrunk so much, she’d slipped through the fabric of the universe.

_She “fell back into the Dreamlands,”_ Kylo thought.  _Whatever she and Nyarlathotep are, they aren’t meant to exist here, in reality._   He put Emily—and her parting words—from his mind and turned back to Poe.

“Poe,” whispered Kylo, reaching out to brush the other man’s cheek with his fingertips.  Even though his whole purpose in being there was to awaken Poe, Kylo touched him gently.  No matter how much they contact they’d had in the dream realm, Kylo now knew it wasn’t the same as being with Poe in reality.  In the yellow-green light reflected off the moon or planet in the sky above them, Kylo could see care and exhaustion on Poe’s handsome face which hadn’t been present in Serannian or even in Kadath.  A small scar marred Poe’s cheek, just under his right eye, and Kylo realized with a sickening feeling that it had probably come from the torture Poe had undergone at his command.

Yet Poe remained the most beautiful thing Kylo could imagine ever seeing; nothing in the waking galaxy or the dream realm or anywhere else could have compared.  Kylo bent over him and touched his lips to Poe’s.  The smaller man did not stir then, nor when Kylo sat back and stroked his fingers through Poe’s wavy hair.

“Poe,” Kylo said with more firmness.  “Poe, wake up!”  He put his hands on Poe’s shoulders and shook him gently, to no response.  He had hoped that by reaching Poe quickly, he might be able to wake him, to pull Poe away from whatever hold Nyarlathotep had.  Now, though, Kylo realized how naïve that hope had been.  He shook Poe harder, called out louder, to no avail.

Kylo tried to suppress the fury which rose in him.  For once, he understood that anger would do him no good; yelling and raging would awaken Poe no more than kisses could.  He shook Poe a final time, then drew back and took deep, slow breaths to try to calm himself.

_I have to go back in,_ he thought.  _I have to go back to the Dreamlands, to Kadath, and take Poe away from him.  But how can I just. . . go to sleep, here and now?  And even if I can, how will I find the Dreamlands again, when I could only get there before with him?_

Kylo groaned and dropped his forehead into both hands, clenching his fingers into his tangled hair.  The oppressive humidity of the tropical world weighed upon his skin, although a cool breeze threaded its way into the clearing where Poe lay.  With the Force, Kylo could feel the life that teemed in the jungle all around them, and the life that beat within Poe’s sleeping form.  Poe felt so familiar; he felt as right as Emily had felt wrong.  Sitting there, feeling that, Kylo let his anger go, and with it, the turbulence that almost constantly plagued his brain calmed.  The warring voices within fell silent one by one, until just a single injunction remained:

_You can sleep, and you can find him.  Go now._

The voice was familiar, one of those Kylo had often heard within him, and he decided to trust it.  He lay down close beside Poe, then took the smaller man’s body into his arms.  With Poe’s head on his chest, Kylo rested his cheek on the pilot’s hair and closed his eyes.  He shifted his breathing to match Poe’s breaths and reached out with the Force for Poe’s thoughts.  This last act unnerved Kylo, because it reminded him of what he had done to Poe in the interrogation chamber, and of the first dream he’d had of the other man since their parting.  Yet now, he touched Poe’s mind with the gentlest caress he could, not reading his thoughts but instead only sensing Poe’s presence, trying to be with him.

For the first time since he could remember, complete peace settled over Kylo.  He felt no conflict within his mind or heart, just calmness. . . calmness and love for the man he held in his embrace.  Kylo allowed himself to relax, and just as the Force-whisper in his mind had promised, he drifted into sleep.

\--

At first, Kylo thought he’d entered the wrong dream after all, for he stood not in the castle at Kadath but in the midst of a jungle not much different from that where he’d found Poe sleeping.  Yet after a moment, he recognized it as the place on Yavin IV Poe said Nyarlathotep had showed him, the place where he and Kylo had shared their first kiss.  And Poe was there, standing before a familiar tree with his back to Kylo and his shoulders hunched in his leather jacket.  It was nighttime there too, and Kylo could feel the same cool evening breeze chasing away the oppressive daytime humidity he remembered so well.

“Poe,” he whispered.  The small huddled figure in front of him started, then spun to face him.  Poe stared at Ben with wide, dark eyes.

“Ben?  Is. . . that really you?” Poe asked.  Kylo stared right back at him, confused and insulted that Poe could doubt him after he’d given up so much to return to Kadath.  But then, Poe said in a hushed voice, “Nyarlathotep said he could look like anybody.  That if I wanted you here so badly, he could—”  Poe broke off and looked away as an expression of utter disgust crossed his face.

“He could be you, and I would never know the difference,” Poe finished in a mutter.  Kylo felt just as revolted to imagine Nyarlathotep making love to Poe in his, Kylo’s, body, but the idea that Nyarlathotep would take things that far made Kylo question just who was the focus of the deity’s bizarre manipulations.  Did he simply want to punish Kylo for his audacity, or whatever it was that Nyarlathotep so hated in the Skywalkers?

_Or is this all about Nyarlathotep himself?_ Kylo suddenly wondered.  _Maybe it really is just an experiment, a bored man—Emily said he’s immortal but still a man—looking for what keeps other people going.  Someone who can’t die trying to find out what other people live for._

Poe was watching him again, even more apprehensive than before, and Kylo realized he had never answered his beloved’s question.

“It’s really me,” he told Poe.  “I don’t know what I can say to make you believe me, but. . . it’s me.”

“You came back for me?”

Kylo scowled and grumbled, “Of course I did!  He made me wake up, but I wasn’t going to just _leave_ you here.”  He took a step toward Poe, and when the other man didn’t draw back, Kylo came to stand in front of him.  “This is what he promised to give you, isn’t it?  The place where you were once happy.”

Poe nodded, and although his eyes still held some doubt, he said, “Yes, the place where I fell in love with you.  But it wasn’t—isn’t the same, I knew it wouldn’t be.Not without you. . . and even _with_ you, even if you’ve come to stay here with me—Ben, I can’t be happy like this!”  Poe turned his whole body to the side, away from Kylo, and brought one hand up to cover his forehead and clutch the locks of hair that fell over it.

“I’m sorry,” Poe mumbled in what was nearly a moan.  “I’m sorry you’re not enough.”

Kylo wasn’t angry at that.  In fact, it didn’t even hurt much, because he had known it all along, even before he turned to the Dark: someone like Poe would always need more than just him, or any lover, to be happy.  Poe had too much to live for.

Still, Kylo remembered what Poe had told him in the castle of Serannian, and he murmured sadly, “You said I was your everything.”

“You _are_ ,” Poe groaned.  He spun to face Kylo again and grasped the taller man’s shoulders.  “Ben, that’s _why_.  I love you too much to give up everything we have yet to do!  What the Dark did to you, I can’t just let that go, and I can’t let them keep hurting the other people we care about.”  Poe took a shuddering breath to calm himself, then went on, “Ben, why do you think I’ve fought so hard?  Why do you think I didn’t just give you what you wanted when you captured me, or didn’t follow you to the First Order in the first place?”

Kylo shook his head.  “I don’t know.”

“Because I love you.”  Poe cast a teary, desperate smile up at him.  “Because I was—I _am_ fighting to bring you home.  I can never be truly happy without you, but if _you_ were happy, if you were where you’re meant to be. . . I could let you go.  It’s just that I know you’re _not!_ ”

As clearly as if he were looking down on the scene, Kylo visualized his real body as it must look at that moment: asleep at Poe’s side, enfolding the other man in his arms and trying to shield Poe from all the dangers he now faced because of Kylo’s actions.

“Poe, I’m exactly where I’m meant to be,” he whispered.

“No!  Ben. . . .”  Poe lifted his hands from Kylo’s shoulders to cup his face.  “When you left, you said you had to finish what your grandfather started.  Why can’t you see that you were wrong?  You’re not meant to complete it—you’re meant to put an _end_ to it.”  Poe’s fingers curled under Kylo’s jaws, and his hand trembled as he hissed, “We’re meant to put an end to it _together_.”

“That’s why I came back here,” Kylo told him.  He wrapped his own arms around Poe and drew the other man against his chest; Poe’s hands slipped to the nape of Kylo’s neck then down his back as he melted into Kylo’s embrace.  Kylo whispered into Poe’s ear, “I know how to end it, because now I know it wasn’t my grandfather who started it at all.  It was Nyarlathotep—he gave Grandfather the dreams that drove him to the Dark.”

Poe gasped and breathed, “Ben—” but Kylo went on before he could say anything else.

“He wanted to see what my grandfather would do, how he would react—like an animal subject in an experiment, except the experiment affected the entire galaxy.”  Kylo’s voice faltered; then he forced himself to continue, “That’s why you have to wake up, Poe.  You have to help put it right out there.  I thought that’s what I was doing, I thought the First Order was the way.  But now, I don’t know what is right anymore.  I can only trust that _you_ know, just like you always have.”

“But I _can’t_ wake up!” Poe groaned.  “You said it yourself, Nyarlathotep wants to keep me here forever!”

“No, I’ve realized it now—it’s not you he wants, it’s me.”

Poe stammered, “But he—he woke you up, he drove you out so he could keep _me_.”

“He woke me up because he knew that would only make me more determined to come back.”  Kylo smiled bitterly into Poe’s hair as he realized just how neatly Nyarlathotep had mined his psychology and manipulated him.  “The words he said to me in that horrible-sounding language, just before I woke up. . . he’d said them to me before.  Now I know what they mean: ‘Come dream and cross over into the Dreamlands forever.’”

Kylo pulled back just enough to be able to look down into Poe’s face as he told the smaller man, “Now that I’ve come back, you can wake up any time you’d like.  This—”  He gestured at the replication of Yavin IV around them.  “—isn’t real.  Only Kadath is real, Kadath in the cold wastes.  That’s all Nyarlathotep has to offer you.”

His words caused enough doubt in Poe’s mind to shatter the illusion of his homeworld.  The trees and foliage dissolved into the distant onyx walls and patterned floor of Kadath, and the humidity in the air condensed into the smudgy mists that filled its rooms.  When the mists began to gather themselves into a shifting mass, Kylo realized that Nyarlathotep had been all around them, all along.

Kylo bent his head to kiss Poe firmly on the mouth and, while Poe was still too startled to protest, whisper, “I love you, Poe.  Now you have to wake up.”

“What?”  Poe gave him a dazed look which quickly turned to the pilot’s familiar, stubborn glare.  “No!  I’m not going to just leave you here!  I told you days ago, you’re not just going to trade places with me—”

“Yes, I am,” Kylo interrupted him.  Poe growled something inaudible and wriggled free of Kylo’s grasp, just as Kylo had expected.  He did not want their parting words once more to be an argument, especially this time when Kylo was certain he could never see Poe again.  _But if it drives him out of this place, if he wakes up just to get away from me, so be it,_ he thought.

The congealing mists had taken the vague shape of a man, and Kylo could see Nyarlathotep’s handsome humanoid face clearly through the swirling fog.

“Let him make his choice, Poe,” the deity purred.  “What he told you is correct—you may think of this dream you’ve shared as an experiment.  You are a variable in that experiment, but Kylo Ren is the subject.  I had a hypothesis to test, one which I first tested on Anakin Skywalker: life is selfish.  It seeks always to alleviate whatever feelings make it uncomfortable.  Its pain.  Its fear.  Its guilt.”

Poe had stared at Nyarlathotep’s amorphous body and smirking face while the deity spoke, but now he looked back at Kylo.  As Poe’s eyes narrowed, Kylo could almost literally visualize Nyarlathotep’s insidious words working in him like a bewitching spell.

“Your _guilt._   Now I understand, you—you _coward_!” Poe snarled at Kylo.  “Are you too afraid to face what you’ve done, is that why you’re doing this?  It’s easier to just stay asleep, isn’t it?”

“Of course it is,” Nyarlathotep answered smoothly.  “Especially when he gets to be the hero for saving _you_.  You wake up, he doesn’t.  You have to face the consequences of his actions. . . he doesn’t.  Just like Carter and Kuranes came here seeking escape from their waking realities, he can build the empire here which he could never have achieved in your galaxy.”

Poe clearly seethed as he regarded Kylo with a hatred that rivaled the look in his eyes when they reunited on Jakku.  Tears brimmed in Kylo’s eyes, but he didn’t even try to speak over Nyarlathotep or to counter the deity’s version of his motives.  _Poe knows I really did want to conquer Serannian, once,_ Kylo realized, _and anyway, Nyarlathotep isn’t lying about the rest of it.  Staying here **is** easier, and I **am** selfish.  I’ve always been selfish.  Let Poe remember that and believe whatever else Nyarlathotep tells him. . . that way, at least, he won’t miss me anymore.  That way, he can be happy. . . ._

Kylo suppressed those thoughts and managed to keep his voice steady as he pleaded, “Poe, you have to wake up now.”

“So you can get on with conquering the Dreamlands?” Poe spat.  “I won’t let you!  You’re not like Kuranes, your body’s still alive somewhere with the First Order protecting you, so—so even if you wake me up and I can’t come back here again, I’ll still stop you!”  He heaved a breath that sounded almost like a sob.  “I’ll find you and—and—!”

In spite of his rage, Poe’s face looked as if it were about to shatter into tears, and Kylo couldn’t bear any more.  He screamed back at Poe, “You’ll kill me!  You’ll find me and kill me!  Do it then—I’m right beside you, Poe, I’m _right beside you_!  Kill me if you want, it doesn’t matter anymore, but just—wake— _up!”_

All the fury and anguish dropped out of Poe’s eyes, leaving bewilderment in their place.  He opened his mouth as if about to question what Kylo meant, but before he could begin to speak, Poe disappeared.

_He’s awake,_ Kylo thought.  His dream-body went shaky all over with relief.  _He woke up, and he’s safe.  That’s all that matters._

\--

To be continued


	10. Chapter 10

Kylo half-expected it all to end there, that Poe really would decide that killing Kylo in his sleep was for the best.  But of course Kylo went on dreaming, and he sighed as he reflected, _Every time we’ve fought over the years, we’ve always said things we don’t mean.  Poe’s every bit as hot-headed as I am. . . and Nyarlathotep knows that.  He knew just what to say to get the outcome he wanted, to prove his hypothesis correct._

Yet when Kylo forced himself to look at the deity once more, Nyarlathotep looked back with a strange expression in his glittering eyes.  The rest of him, even his face, had become insubstantial again, but those eyes held firm.

“Well now,” Nyarlathotep said after a moment.  “You’ve surprised me.”

“What?”  Kylo searched the eyes in the mist and realized their strange expression really was one of surprise. . . and perhaps a hint of respect.

Nyarlathotep repeated, “Life is selfish.  I knew that long before I came upon your grandfather.  He only proved to me that even the most gifted of mortals are as selfish as the least, when he slew the innocent and foisted pain upon others so as to lessen his own.  I knew selfishness in my first moment of awareness, because Azathoth fathered me only to serve him. . . just as the Maker shaped Azathoth and Emily and the other progenitors of my kind to serve _Him_.  The very act of creation is selfish, the desire to shape in one’s own image.  You mortals have children so that you may live forever in the only way you can, or you create works of art, or literature, or institutions.  Or dream cities.”

Although Nyarlathotep had in no way explained how Kylo had surprised him, Kylo did not interrupt.  He felt too tired, too drained.  _And anyway,_ he thought, _I have forever.  I’ll be here forever, so I may as well let him talk._   The mists of the Crawling Chaos shifted and formed gossamer shapes which persisted a moment before dissolving into others.  Kylo saw a glimpse of the mass of tentacles who had threatened him over Serannian but also the silhouette of a slender young girl not unlike Emily, a skeleton, a sphinx.

Then, finally, Nyarlathotep said, “You surprised me, because when I threatened the things Anakin Skywalker loved most, he destroyed them all to stop his pain.  I thought you would do the same—you _had_ done so up until now.  Yet you have given up everything so your Poe could be free.  I thought love was the most selfish emotion a being could possess, yet here you’ve proven me wrong.  Your love is an unselfish anomaly, and something to consider.”

The thought occurred to Kylo that he might have just witnessed the first time the Crawling Chaos admitted to being wrong about something.  However, he focused on another part of what Nyarlathotep had said.

“My grandfather didn’t destroy all he loved,” Kylo murmured.  “Didn’t you follow him after he turned to the Dark?  Don’t you know how his life ended?”

“Tell me,” said Nyarlathotep.

“He died protecting his son, my uncle.”  Kylo fixed his gaze on the dark eyes which were now the only part of Nyarlathotep which had any shape to it.  “He gave up everything for someone he loved.  Sometimes, I think that was his weakness, and sometimes, I think it was his strength. . . but if you’ve never noticed the sacrifices love can make, despite its selfishness, your ‘experiments’ haven’t taught you very much.”

As Kylo fell silent and Nyarlathotep’s starry eyes regarded him from within the mists, Kylo realized he could feel something of the deity’s emotions.  It was only a breath, a hint of the depths of what Nyarlathotep felt—Kylo was sure that like his true face, Nyarlathotep’s true emotions would drive any mortal to madness.  Yet he sensed a little of them: curiosity, hunger, pique.  At first, Kylo didn’t know why, but then he understood.

_The Force. . . I can feel the Force again._

Before Kylo could ponder the meaning of that, Nyarlathotep replied to him, “If you think I haven’t learned from my experiments, then perhaps you feel further observations are in order.  Very well—since you will be here in the dream realm for quite some time, I will watch you and see what else I can learn.”  The swirl of mist below his eyes curled, hinting at a smile.  “So what are you going to do now, Kylo Ren?  Will you try to conquer Serannian like you always wished to do?  Or do you have greater ambitions now that you’ve seen more of the Dreamlands?”

“Yes, I have greater ambitions,” Kylo answered.  It was not something he’d thought about before; he had been too focused on Poe to wonder what he himself would actually do for an eternity in the dream realm.  Yet the answer had come to him immediately, because he knew he could not bear any alternative.

He told the Crawling Chaos, “I want to cross the void of space, as far as Kuranes has gone and beyond.  I want to behold the face of Azathoth, the Nuclear Chaos, and hear the piping of the infernal flute which lulls him into eternal sleep.”

The intensity of Nyarlathotep’s surprise startled Kylo and gave him some grim amusement at the same time.  All at once, the mists around the deity’s eyes snapped into a physical form again, the familiar, humanoid shape he usually took.  His haughty glare didn’t quite hide how stunned he was.  After all, surely no one else had ever _wanted_ to see Azathoth’s hideous face, while fully accepting the madness it would bring. 

“You’re a fool,” Nyarlathotep breathed.  “No mortal may see that sight nor hear that sound and retain his sanity.”

Kylo replied, “I know that, and that is why I wish to do it.  If I must stay here forever, better that I can’t remember anything else.  Better that I know nothing than live forever with _you_.”  Nyarlathotep’s elegant lip curled in a rancor Kylo felt keenly using the empathy the Force gave him.

“Then I have the answers to those questions I asked you not so long ago,” said the Crawling Chaos with that thin smile.  “I asked what mattered most to you, and if you would go too far for it—now I know.  Very well, you’ll have what you want.  I will carry you into the void, out beyond the edges of the omniverse to where Azathoth dreams and gibbers.”

Nyarlathotep changed again into a form Kylo had not seen before: a huge shape like what Emily had become when she carried Kylo and Poe to Kadath.  Like her, he most closely resembled a cube, but also like her, he was a cube which rotated in a way that seemed physically impossible.  Like her, he felt wrong.  His facets looked as if they were made of foil instead of crystal, crumpled foil stained red and black and gold rather than pink and iridescent.  The dark, glittering colors mottled his surface like a blight as he loomed over Kylo, but Kylo did not flinch away from him.

Nyarlathotep extended a ray of energy like Emily had; with him, it could not be called light but was more like the absence of it.  The image within it was incoherent, a jumble of colors smeared across a colorless infinity.  _Is that Azathoth?_ Kylo wondered.  _Or the clouds Kuranes talked about, S’ngac and her kind?  When I step through his gateway, will I lose my mind immediately, or will it happen slowly?  Will he even really send me there or will he trick me?_

_Does it even matter what happens to me now?_

“Go on,” said Nyarlathotep.  His voice echoed as Emily’s had, and it carried all the scorn his face had shown in his usual guise.  “Go now.”

They were the same words the familiar voice had spoken when it told him to rejoin Poe in Kadath.  That voice certainly hadn’t been Nyarlathotep’s, but the memory of it gave Kylo comfort now.  He looked away from the horrible sight of the Crawling Chaos’s infernal geometric form and stepped through the gateway he had opened.

\--

But Kylo did not emerge into the void.  Instead, he hovered over Serannian as he had in the dreams-within-dreams where Nyarlathotep had taunted him, except Serannian was not the bleak, flattened landscape of those nightmares.  This was the real Serannian, cloud-laced and vibrant, and Nyarlathotep was not there.  A young man, younger even than Kylo, floated in his place.  He was blond, handsome, no one Kylo had ever met before yet utterly familiar.  Although he wasn’t smiling, he looked at Kylo with affection.

“Ben,” said the man.  His voice was the one which had spoken to Kylo as Poe slept, the voice Kylo had heard in his mind so often before.

“Who are you?” Kylo asked hoarsely.  The young man did smile then, grinned in fact.  The smile was awkward, clumsy, and full of joy all at the same time.

_That’s how Luke used to smile,_ Kylo thought.  _It’s how I used to smile, back before I realized just how awkward and clumsy it was, before I didn’t let myself smile anymore._   The thought bled into the memory of Poe in bed with him in Serannian, looking up at him with wonder and breathing, “You’re smiling.  I thought I’d never see your smile again.”  The tears Kylo had struggled to hold back in front of Poe overflowed now, and the other man’s smile softened into a look of sympathy.

“It’s all right, Ben,” he said.  He stepped closer to Kylo, walking on nothing but air, until they stood face to face; then he reached out his hand, fingers extended upward and palm toward Kylo.  Kylo scrubbed the back of his own hand across his eyes before touching his fingertips to the other man’s.  Kylo’s hand was larger, but he felt as if the man’s touch stabilized him and brought him strength, because the Force ran through it like a thread binding the two of them together. . . a thread that had always been there but that Kylo had never noticed until now.  He closed his eyes and saw with the Force instead; then he knew.

“Grandfather,” Kylo breathed.  Anakin Skywalker pressed his palm against Kylo’s and interlaced their fingers.  Kylo murmured, “You’ve always been with me, haven’t you?  You’ve been speaking to me all along, and I never listened until now.  I never understood. . . .”  He clenched his hand around Anakin’s and gasped, “I’m sorry.  I’m sorry. . . .”

“It’s all right,” Anakin said again.  “Look at me, Ben.”  Kylo did, and he saw a man at peace, a whole man with all the scars and wounds of his mortal life healed.  Anakin’s smile returned, gentler than before, as he went on, “You understand now.  That’s enough.”

Kylo protested, “But it’s too late.  Everything I’ve done—”

“It’s not too late,” Anakin countered.  “What you told Nyarlathotep about me, what he didn’t know. . . if I was not too late then, how could you be, now?”  When Kylo could not answer and only gazed at him with a bleak, desperate stare, Anakin explained, “You said that I gave up everything for someone I loved, and that’s just what you’ve done here.  I gave up my life so my son could live, and you gave up yours so the person you love could be free.  But you can take your life back—you can wake up and help him make things right.”

“He won’t forgive me for what I’ve done,” whispered Kylo.  “He hates me.”  He felt the comforting pressure of Anakin’s hand squeezing his.

“No.  He loves you.  If there are things he has not yet forgiven, he will, in time.  As. . . as my son and daughter will forgive you.”  Anakin’s voice wavered with emotion, with love and with pride.  “Ben, the hardest part of putting things right is not _getting_ forgiveness, but _asking_ for it.  Let me ask you something: do you forgive me for what I’ve done to you?”

“Wh-what?  What do you mean?” stammered Kylo.

Anakin’s answer was heavy with regret: “I turned to the Dark out of my own selfishness, and so you’ve lived your life under that shadow, until you came to believe that following my path was the only answer.  Can you forgive me for that?”

Wide-eyed, Kylo cried, “Of course!  Grandfather—it was my doing, not yours, and whatever you were before. . . that doesn’t matter anymore.”

Anakin smiled again and said, “Then you understand why you will be forgiven too.”  He let go of Kylo’s hand to place both of his own on Kylo’s shoulders.  “We are each of us responsible for our actions, which is what makes forgiveness so precious.  But I couldn’t stand by and let Nyarlathotep manipulate you as he did me.  He doesn’t care about the Dark or the Light, but there are those who do, and those who will take advantage of chaos to impose their own kind of order.  I couldn’t let his dreams ruin you too.”

“You helped Emily follow me after I woke up, didn’t you?” Kylo whispered.  “She said someone asked her to go after me, and she wasn’t strong enough to do it on her own.  And you helped me to go back to sleep, and led me back to Kadath.”

“Yes, and how do you think you found Serannian in the first place, you and Poe together?”  Anakin grinned suddenly at the stunned look Kylo gave him.  “Now, though, I think you’ll be able to get back here on your own.  After the first time, it only gets easier.”

“But can I really wake up?  I took Poe’s place, I thought I would be trapped here forever.  That’s why I—I wanted to—”  Kylo broke off, unable to voice the horror he would have chosen over an eternal life with his memories of what he’d lost.

“Yes,” Anakin assured him, “you can really wake up.  As Kuranes said, to escape Nyarlathotep once is to escape him forever—and you escaped him when you went to face Azathoth without any fear.  The very worst Nyarlathotep can threaten is to send you into that void, and you would have gone willingly.  Therefore, he is powerless over you.”

Kylo hesitated, then whispered, “Grandfather. . . if I wake up, will I ever see you again?”

“My dear grandson, I will always be with you.”  Anakin squeezed Kylo’s shoulders, then suddenly pulled Kylo to him and embraced him.  “I can’t promise that the Dark won’t call to you, but I will be there to help you when it does.”  After Kylo brought up his arms and returned his grandfather’s embrace, Anakin stepped back and added with that familiar smile, “And I think you’ll see me again right here, in your dreams.”

Kylo nodded.  He could feel the dream receding, or rather, he could feel himself receding from the dream realm.  He was coming awake, not all at once but slowly, and Serannian seemed very far away below his feet.

“Thank you, Grandfather,” he murmured.

As the Dreamlands faded away, Kylo heard Anakin say, “May the Force be with you, Ben.”

\--

When he awoke fully, Kylo felt disoriented: he lay on his back instead of standing upright, and the hard ground dug into his shoulder blades where there had been nothing but air at his back only a moment before.  His eyes were closed, and he felt loath to open them; he wanted to keep the image of his grandfather in his mind a little longer.

But then other sensations washed over him.  Pressure against his chest, hands shaking his shoulders, and a muffled voice sobbing his name: “Ben. . . Ben, please wake up, _please_.”  A choked cry of “Ben, come back to me!”

“Poe!” Kylo gasped.  He clutched at the weight on his chest and found it to be Poe’s upper body.  Poe had his face buried against Kylo’s left shoulder, but his head shot up at the sound of Kylo’s voice.  By the time Kylo got his eyes open, Poe was staring down into them.  Poe’s own warm brown eyes were rimmed with red irritation from crying, and he sniffled wetly.

“Ben?” he croaked.  He turned his head to wipe his face on the sleeve of his loose, tunic-style shirt, then looked down again at the larger man beneath him to demand, “Are you really awake?  Am _I?_   We’re not—not still dreaming, are we?”

Kylo’s arms embraced Poe’s shoulders convulsively, and he whispered, “No.  We’re not still dreaming.”  Poe dropped his head down against Kylo’s chest again, and he lay there trembling while Kylo held him.

After a moment, Poe murmured, “It’s almost dawn.”

“Where are we?” Kylo asked softly.  He lifted his eyes up to the pieces of the sky he could see in between the dense clumps of leaves overhead.  It had lightened from black to a delicate blue-lavender.

“Tharabos,” Poe told him; then he pushed himself up by his hands on either side of Kylo’s head.  “Wait—how did you get here if you didn’t know—and _how_ did you get here?  I just realized, there’s no craft anywhere.”

Kylo let his eyes fall closed as he sighed, “Emily.  After Nyarlathotep woke me up, she followed me and said she would take me to you.”

“Emily?  But—where is she?  She wasn’t here when I woke up.”

“She didn’t have enough energy to stay—she barely had enough to bring me here.  She went back to the Dreamlands, I think.”  Kylo decided not to tell Poe about his grandfather’s role in the help Emily gave them, or about meeting Anakin in the Dreamlands. . . not yet.  _Someday,_ Kylo thought.  _If I am still with him, I’ll tell him someday._

Poe lay back down against Kylo and stayed quiet for a while before he asked, “Did you know, when she brought you here?  Did you know she wouldn’t take you back to. . . wherever you came from?”

“I knew,” Kylo whispered.

“How will you get. . . home?”

“I don’t know.”  Kylo lay still, feeling Poe’s back rise and fall with his breathing under Kylo’s hands; then he said suddenly, “I’m not going back.  I can’t, not knowing what I do about Nyarlathotep.  Not knowing that his manipulation is what led my grandfather to the Dark.  Everything I thought I knew—maybe it _is_ truth of a sort, but it might as well be lies.  I have too much doubt in me now to have a place back there.”  Behind his closed lids, his eyes ached with tears, despite his joy at finding Poe safe.  “I don’t have a place _anywhere_ , anymore.”

When Poe spoke again, it was to murmur, “I’m sorry I called you a coward.  I’m sorry for everything I said.  I thought—I didn’t know what you gave up to come back for me.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” said Kylo.  “You had no reason to believe in me.”

“I had _every_ reason!” Poe protested.  “You’ve never lied to me, Ben, _never_.  You’ve never even told the truth slant.  You said you loved me, and I should have believed you.”

“I do love you, Poe,” Kylo whispered.

“I know,” Poe said; then he covered Kylo’s mouth with his own and kissed him deeply, their first real, physical kiss in longer than Kylo cared to remember.  He slid his fingers into Poe’s hair, gone from waves to curls in the humid atmosphere of the jungle world of Tharabos, and held the smaller man’s head to his while he kissed Poe back.  Poe pulled back after a moment and sat up.

“Come on, get up,” he chuckled, pulling on Kylo’s arm.  “I don’t want to go back to sleep for a long time—and anyway, this really is a lovely place.  I want to see the sunrise.”  Kylo got to his feet alongside Poe and was amazed when Poe grasped his hand and led him away from the clearing into the vegetation surrounding it.

“It’s very like Yavin IV,” Kylo ventured as they walked.  He wasn’t sure he should say anything that might remind Poe of his imprisonment in Kadath, but Poe smiled and nodded.

“Yes, it’s a nice place.”  Poe hesitated himself, then mumbled, “I’m glad you’re here to see it with me.”  His words made Kylo’s heart beat more quickly, the way it had the night of their first kiss so long ago.

“So am I,” said Kylo.  “But why are you here, Poe, all alone?”

Poe bit his bottom lip then shrugged and replied, “I don’t guess it matters if I tell you now.  There’s been a rumor—from what we _thought_ was a very reliable source—that the First Order had a base somewhere on Tharabos, so the general sent a few of us out here to scout for it.  This was supposed to be the most likely spot for it, so the ship dropped me off here, and the others went on to check other locations.  But. . . obviously, there’s nothing here.”

“No,” agreed Kylo.  “Whoever your ‘reliable source’ is, there’s no First Order base in this entire system.”  He paused then said with a rueful chuckle, “Under ordinary circumstances, neither of us should have shared that information. . . but like you said, it doesn’t matter now.”

They had reached the banks of a small river, and Poe stopped Kylo beside him.  The air was even more humid there beside the water, and when Kylo looked down at Poe, the smaller man’s skin had a sheen of moisture over it that made it seem to glow.

“They’re not coming back for me until tomorrow,” Poe murmured.  “We thought it would take longer here than it has.”  His eyes had a familiar sparkle to them, one that Kylo once knew well.  Even now, and even without using the Force, Kylo could tell exactly what Poe was thinking.

“So you’re saying we have the whole day alone,” Kylo said.  Poe smiled, but his face fell when Kylo continued, “And after that, what then?” 

“You said you weren’t going back,” Poe reminded him.  His eyes still sparkled but in a different way, and Kylo knew that look too—no longer playful but determined.  Kylo reached out his hand and, after hesitating, touched Poe’s slick cheek.

“I’m not.  But _you_ are.  You’ll go back with the Resistance when they come pick you up tomorrow.”  Kylo heard the tremble in his own voice and tried to smother it.

“And you’ll do what, stay here?” Poe muttered.  “Stay here all by yourself, on an uninhabited planet—there’s not even any animal life bigger than my hand, at least not that I’ve seen—all by yourself with no supplies, no shelter—”

“I’ve survived worse, Poe,” Kylo argued as gently as he could manage.  “I have the Force.”

Poe actually rolled his eyes.  “Oh, come _off_ it.  You’d go to pieces, and you know it.  Just because _Jedi_ seem to like running off to become hermits doesn’t mean that every Force-user—”  He broke off when Kylo pulled back and turned away from him.  Despite what Poe probably thought, he hadn’t angered Kylo by reminding him of his uncle (and, for that matter, the Jedi for whom Kylo had been named).  Nevertheless, Kylo didn’t want to think about Luke Skywalker just then.

He heard Poe sigh, “Ben, I’m sorry.  I just. . . .”  His voice trailed off; then he said in a different tone, “Look at the sky.  The sun’s coming up.”

Kylo looked up at the open sky over the river.  It had faded to the palest of blues, but a few low clouds which edged the horizon lit up with pink and orange.  The top edge of the planet’s sun peeked over one of the clouds and glowed.

“It’s beautiful,” Poe whispered.  He sounded very close behind Kylo, and then Kylo felt the smaller man’s hands on his upper arms, and Poe’s cheek resting against the side of his shoulder.

When Kylo agreed, “It is,” Poe slid his arms around him and pressed up against his back.  They watched the sunrise in silence, until it was too high in the sky for them to look at safely.  Then when Kylo turned to face Poe again, Poe slipped into his arms.  Once again, he felt familiar and _right_ there.

“Ben, I want you to come back with us tomorrow,” Poe whispered.  “I want you to come back with _me_.  I want you to come home.”  That idea panicked Kylo as the thought of surviving alone on Tharabos had not.

“I _can’t_ , Poe!” he protested.  “When the other Resistance fighters get here tomorrow, they’ll probably try to shoot me on sight.”

“You could stop them,” Poe mumbled into Kylo’s cloak.  “You stopped _me_ from shooting you, on Jakku.  And anyway, I wouldn’t _let_ them shoot you.  I’ll explain.”

“Explain what?  That I’ve betrayed the First Order and joined the Resistance because of a dream?”

Unruffled, Poe said, “Something like that.  Ben, they’ll listen to me, they respect me.  Best pilot in the Resistance, remember?”

“How could I forget?” Kylo sighed drily.  He hugged Poe against him and rested his cheek on the pilot’s damp hair.  “But even if you convinced them to let me come back with you, there’s—there’s still the general.”  He closed his eyes and muttered, “My mother.”

“I told you, Ben, she loves you,” Poe said gently.  “She wants you to come home.”

“Maybe she did once, but not now,” Kylo insisted.  He gritted his teeth and hissed, “Poe, I _killed_ my _father_.  Even if she could forgive me for all the rest of it, how could she forgive me _that_?”

“Because she’s your mother, and she loves you,” replied Poe.  He tilted his head back to look up at Kylo, who lifted his own head and gazed back down at the other man.  Poe said, “The hard part of forgiveness is swallowing your pride and asking for it.  _Getting_ it is easy.”  Kylo caught his breath to hear those words, so like what Anakin had said to him just before Kylo awoke.

Poe searched his eyes then murmured, “You don’t have to decide right now, we’ve got all day.  Just—think about it, okay?  Please?”  Kylo swallowed, licked his lips, and didn’t reply.  Poe’s own eyes widened ever so slightly, just enough to go all soft and pleading, and he begged, “ _Please_ , Ben, promise me you’ll think about it.  I know it’s selfish of me, but I don’t want to be apart from you anymore.  I don’t want to see only you in my dreams!”

“I’ll think about it,” Kylo whispered through numb lips, “I promise.”  He could resist Poe’s anger, his bitterness and his sarcasm, but he had never been able to resist that pleading look.  Poe kept studying him a few more seconds, breathing hard; then he nodded and hugged Kylo again.  After that, he pulled out of their embrace and, to Kylo’s surprise, stripped his shirt off.  Kylo’s eyes darted down Poe’s tan chest which glistened as much as his face, then up again.  Poe grinned at him.

“Like you said, we’ve got the whole day alone,” he announced, “and I haven’t had a day off in ages.  I wanna go swimming.”

Kylo’s mouth felt totally dry as he asked, “The way we used to, back on Yavin IV?”

“Yeah,” Poe purred as he sauntered back to Kylo and reached up to slip the larger man’s cloak off his shoulders.  “Just the way we used to.”

\--

The day passed far too quickly for Kylo’s liking.  Their “swimming” led to making love on the riverbank—which was, in fact, the “way they used to” swim, too.  When Kylo entered Poe, leaning over where the smaller man lay on his back and gazed up at him through his eyelashes, he gasped and shuddered.

“You feel so tight,” Kylo panted.  He thought he’d just forgotten how good it was, until Poe gave a strained chuckle.

“I-I should hope so, it’s been long enough,” he groaned as he writhed beneath Kylo, trying to draw him in deeper.  “S-so long since you left, I missed this so much!”  Kylo was too distracted to consider the comment at length just then, but afterwards, when they lay wet and sandy in each other’s arms, it came back to him.

“Poe,” Kylo murmured, “you said it had been a long time.  You. . . you didn’t mean that—that. . . .”

“That what?”  Poe’s words were muffled by Kylo’s chest, which he was caressing.

“That I was—your last.  That you—you haven’t. . . .”

“That no one’s fucked me since you?” Poe prompted with his usual bluntness.  “Yeah, that’s what I meant.  Why?”

When Kylo was unable to respond, Poe lifted his head and looked down at him with a little smile.  “You surprised?”

Kylo nodded and whispered, “I haven’t. . . been with anyone else either, but—but you. . . .”

“I told you, I never stopped loving you,” Poe said, still with the gentle smile.  “I never wanted anyone else to take me the way you did, even when I thought you’d never want me again.”  He stroked Kylo’s limp, soaked hair back from his face and whispered, “You never slept with anyone else?  Not at all?”

“Not at all,” Kylo echoed.  “I never stopped wanting you, Poe. . . I never stopped loving you, either.”  He drew Poe back down into his arms and kissed him over and over.

They dressed and returned to Poe’s camp late in the morning to eat; although Kylo refused at first, he eventually accepted some of the rations Poe had with him, as well as several pieces of wild fruit once Poe used a scanner to ensure it wasn’t poisonous.  Afterward, they walked along the river and explored the surrounding area, often hand-in-hand.  It was so like how they’d spent their days together in their youth, yet the thought of the next day hung over Kylo throughout the afternoon.  He wanted so badly to stay with Poe, but at the same time, he feared the reprisals his return to the Resistance would bring—not just for him, but for Poe as well.

_If he vouches for me, he may suffer for it,_ Kylo realized as they strolled back to camp as evening neared.  _And even when—if—they accept me. . . what if it is the wrong path, nevertheless?  What if I really don’t belong anywhere?_

Then a feeling interrupted his thoughts, a feeling that came from the Force.  Kylo’s hand shot out and gripped the shoulder of Poe, who was walking a little ahead of him.

“What?” Poe asked, looking back.

“Shh,” Kylo cautioned.  He moved silently to Poe’s side and put his other hand on the hilt of his lightsaber, taking a position from which he could defend Poe without being conscious that he was doing it.  To his credit, Poe did not question him, and he stayed quiet as Kylo closed his eyes and felt for the presence which had alarmed him.  He realized that there were _several_ presences, and that they were small and benign, just some sentient but harmless indigent species of Tharabos.

Kylo let out the breath he’d been holding and squeezed Poe’s shoulder.  When Poe shot him a questioning look, Kylo gave him a faint, somewhat embarrassed smile.

“I’m sorry, I thought I felt—”  He broke off when they both heard rustling from the leaves and grasses growing close to the ground, ahead and to their right.  The two men looked toward the sound just as the source of the noise, and of Kylo’s feelings, emerged.

It was a herd of little creatures who didn’t even reach Poe’s knees.  Despite their sentience and mobility, they seemed to be plant-like—and, Kylo saw with a jolt, very familiar.  Round, bulb-like bodies, stems bearing two fuzzy leaves sprouting from their tops, four stubby feet on which they toddled forward.  The creatures didn’t notice Kylo and Poe at first, and they made soft chirping noises among themselves as they crossed the men’s path.  Those noises came from the same small mouths, and they blinked the same large, warm brown eyes. . . .

“Lis,” Kylo whispered, startled by the pang he felt in his heart.  “Poe, they look just like her.”

Poe began to whisper back, “Do you think—” but before he could finish, one of the sprouts glanced their   way and saw them.  It froze so that the ones following it stumbled into one another and chirped their irritation, until the first sprout gave a shrill, alarmed shriek.  Then they _all_ looked and went into a panic.  Their frenzied squeaking and scrambling was rather amusing, although Kylo could sense that Poe felt guilty for scaring them.

Yet as the others fell all over each other trying to dive back into the brush, one of the little creatures stood still and stared.  Its broad leaves quivered, and its wide eyes fixed on Kylo.  The sprouts’ language was wordless and incomprehensible to Kylo, but then this one made a sound that was almost a word.

“En. . . ?”

Almost a word.  Almost his name.

“ _Lis!_ ” Kylo gasped.  He didn’t understand how it could be possible that she was real and she was _there_ , that she just happened to have lived her whole life on the quiet little world where Kylo’s mother had sent Poe Dameron to look for a base that didn’t exist.  It _was_ possible though, because when he said her name, Lis’s eyes brightened and she gave a chirp of excitement.

“En!” she squeaked, toddling forward.  “En, En!”

“Lis. . . .”  Kylo started toward her, only to cause even greater commotion among the others of Lis’s herd.  They trilled frantically and scattered in all directions; then when they realized Lis still stood exposed, two of them darted out to retrieve her.  One shoved at her side, and the other clamped its little mouth down on one of her leaves and hauled her toward the cover of the low-hanging leaves.  Lis gave an indignant squeak, but when she lifted her wide eyes back to Kylo’s face, they held some confusion and doubt.

“En?” she murmured.  Her friends kept urging her away, and finally, she turned and scampered with them back into the foliage.

“Ben?  Was that her?”  Poe put his hand on Kylo’s back, then slid it across Kylo’s shoulders to embrace him.  “I’m sorry. . . .”

“No, it’s all right,” said Kylo, although he wished she had stayed.  “I think it was her, but—well, they’ve never seen anything like us, at least not in real life.  I’m glad they know how to protect themselves.”

“Ben. . . .”  Poe leaned against his arm and squeezed his shoulders again.  Kylo knew Poe pitied him and his bleak outlook on life—his belief that it was better for Lis to fear him, for her own safety.  Yet Kylo had lived in the midst of danger too long to hold any viewpoint except one based on caution and mistrust.

_And it’s all right because I will see her again, in our dreams.  I believe it now,_ Kylo told himself as he and Poe finally walked on, holding hands once more.  Something else occurred to him about the coincidence that Lis would be _there_ , on the very planet where he had found Poe: _Maybe it’s not a coincidence at all—maybe it’s the Force, or maybe something else.  But whatever it is, it proves that Chaos isn’t always in control._

Kylo and Poe sat up talking for a while after the sun set and the greenish light of Tharabos’s moon illuminated the little campsite.  They talked about the long distant past, and only happy memories of that, except for a word here and there about Serannian and the Dreamlands.  Poe didn’t ask Kylo again to come with him the following day, but Kylo knew it was on his mind.  He didn’t have to read Poe’s thoughts, or even sense his feelings with the Force; he could see them all with perfect clarity in Poe’s expressive eyes.

Kylo took Poe in his arms and kissed him, hoping to drive away some of the heartbreaking longing he saw on the other man’s face.  Poe responded eagerly enough, and the kisses turned into more love-making, but when they finally lay down to sleep some time later, Poe’s voice trembled when he whispered good night.  He kissed Kylo’s lips one last time then turned his back and curled up almost into a fetal position.  Kylo closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but this time, sleep did not come.

Part of him felt angry at Poe.  He remembered what Poe had said in their last dream together, “I’m sorry you’re not enough.”  Kylo thought, _I’m not good enough for him to stay there with me, but he expects me to risk everything, even my life, to stay with **him**._   Yet Kylo knew that wasn’t fair, because Poe wasn’t only being selfish; he truly believed Kylo belonged with the Resistance, in the place Poe called home.

_He said I was meant to put an end to what my grandfather—no, what Nyarlathotep started.  He said we were meant to put an end to it together.  But how does he know that, for sure?  How can **I** know I won’t just hurt him, and Mother, and everyone else worse if I return?  How can I know that I am forgiven. . . that I am loved?_

Poe’s breathing had become soft and even, and by probing gently at his mind, Kylo confirmed that Poe slept.  The idea of sleeping made both of them anxious, and Kylo hoped Poe wasn’t dreaming.  He sat up and watched Poe’s still form for a moment, then got to his feet and slipped a short distance away.  Kylo wanted and needed to think, and Poe was too much of a distraction.

When he had gone far enough to feel truly alone, Kylo half-sat and half-leaned on the trunk of a tree growing in the meandering, sideways manner of tropical plants, and he thought.  He had only two choices: go with Poe and the other Resistance fighters when they returned the next day, or stay there on Tharabos.  Anything that resulted from either choice was out of his hands.

Kylo couldn’t control how Poe’s comrades—or his own mother—would react to him; he could only trust that Poe would defend him if they questioned his motives.  Likewise, whatever might happen if he hid from the Resistance and remained on Tharabos was beyond his control as well.  Maybe he could befriend Lis again and make her herd understand that he posed no danger to him; if not, Kylo was likely to remain alone, forever.  No one had any reason to come to the little planet, and he doubted even the First Order could find out where he’d gone, spirted away from his room in the middle of the night by a. . . whatever Emily was.

_If Poe leaves without me tomorrow, I won’t get another chance,_ Kylo thought.  _I’ll live out the rest of my life here in exile, alone except for my dreams.  I can see Poe again in my dreams. . . and even that is more than I deserve.  I **deserve** to be alone for all I’ve done._

Then Kylo dropped his head into his hands as tears started in his eyes and he thought, _But it’s not what I **want**!  I want to go with him, I want to be with Poe and let him help me fix everything. . . balance everything._

At first, he didn’t know where the word “balance” had come from, but then Kylo heard it again, like a whisper within his brain.  The whisper sounded like his grandfather had sounded in his dream, and Kylo suddenly remembered what Anakin had told him: that he would always be with Kylo, and that he would help him fight the Dark.

_Is it the Dark that’s trying to keep me here?_ Kylo asked silently.  _Is that what it wants, for me to stay in isolation, doing nothing?  Poe called me a coward when he thought I wanted to stay in the Dreamlands, but maybe staying **here** is what’s true cowardice—staying here and leaving others to suffer, instead of facing what I’ve done and fighting to set it right.  Fighting for forgiveness. . . fighting to be worthy of his love for me._   Kylo lowered his hands from his face and looked up toward the sky, then let his eyes fall closed.

_Grandfather, tell me what to do,_ he pled.  He did not receive an answer in words, but he comprehended it all at once.

_You already know.  You already know what feels right._

“No, I don’t!” Kylo growled out loud through clenched teeth, then immediately felt ashamed.  All his life, he had resented being given orders or told what to do, yet he had always sought out those who would do just that.  When someone—his parents, his uncle, the Supreme Leader; Nyarlathotep, Emily, Kuranes, even Poe—told him what he should do, it relieved Kylo, because then whatever happened became someone else’s fault.  He might complain or rage at their commands, but he continued looking to them for guidance, for the answers.

_And that’s cowardice too,_ Kylo realized, _letting someone else make my choices for me.  I can’t ask Poe if I should stay or go, I can’t even ask Grandfather.  I have to decide on my own._

He straightened up, took in and released a deep breath, and sat with his eyes shut as he asked himself what felt right.

_Balance.  Light and Dark together. . . Order and Chaos together._

_Poe and I together.  Whatever it takes for us to be together._

Kylo opened his eyes and exhaled again; then he got to his feet and went back through the trees to where Poe still slept.  He lay down behind Poe’s back and enfolded the other man in his arms before tilting his head up to caress Poe’s cheek.

“Poe,” he whispered.  “Poe, wake up.”

“Hrmph,” said Poe as he tried to elbow Kylo away.

Kylo tried again, louder: “ _Poe_.  Wake up, I need you.  I need to tell you something.”

“Mmph?  Oh. . . .”  Poe finally came half-awake and mumbled, “Ben, what is it?  Is something wrong?”

“No.  I—I’ve decided to go with you tomorrow.”

Poe stiffened in his arms, then thrashed about to turn over and face Kylo, wide-eyed.

“Really?” he gasped.  “You— _really_?”

“Yes.”  Kylo stroked the wild locks of hair back from Poe’s face as he murmured, “I love you, Poe, and I want to be with you.  Not only that, but. . . you were right, what you said to me in Kadath.  I’m meant to end what began with my grandfather.  It will be hard, but I have to go back.”

Poe beamed at him then grasped Kylo by his hair and held him still for a long, hard kiss.  When Poe finally let up, he cried, “I’ll help you, Ben, I promise.  I know it won’t be easy, but we’ll do it together.”  He pressed close to Kylo’s body with his head down on the larger man’s chest, tucked under Kylo’s chin.  Kylo held him, and Poe mumbled, “I love you, so we can do it together.”

Soon, both Kylo and Poe slept without dreaming.

\--

A long time passed before Emily felt strong enough to leave Serannian.  Eventually, though, her energy returned, and she appeared in Kadath one evening—although there above the plateau of Leng, evening was eternal.  She found Nyarlathotep alone in his throne room, still in a sulky mood.

“Come to gloat?” he muttered.  He looked quite horrific, a mass of slimy tentacles which pulsed like arteries and from which eyeballs peered here and there.  Emily had come in her preferred form, that of the young girl with pink hair.  Unlike Nyarlathotep, she didn’t like to change her face.

“No.”  She stood before him bare-footed with her hands clasped in front of her.  Nyarlathotep rolled several of his eyeballs at once at what he saw as a façade of innocence, like one of the baby-faced angels which mortals from Randolph Carter’s world liked to paint.  She ignored his reaction and continued, “I came to ask you a question.  Why?”

“Why what?”  Nyarlathotep shaped a couple hands out of some tentacles, plucked two of the eyeball from amidst some other tentacles, and began to juggle.  “Do you mean, why do I persist in meddling with mortals—which, I might remind you for the nth time, you do as well?”

“No,” Emily said again, “you’ve said it before, that you’re experimenting.   You get bored, and you experiment on whatever dreamers are skilled enough to find their way here.”  She folded her arms and cocked her hips, and although her avatar didn’t change, she suddenly looked a lot less like an innocent cherub, and a lot more like a nagging wife.  “What I want to know, is why do you _experiment_?  What is it you hope to learn after all this time, that you didn’t learn from the first or the second or the hundredth?  If you want to know what drives them, what makes them function. . . haven’t you found out by now?”

Nyarlathotep muttered, “That isn’t it at all.  I know what makes them function.  Doesn’t matter the species, they all run on love, deep down.  But they all love differently.”  He let the eyeballs drop to the patterned floor with a splat and squirmed impatiently.  “A lot of them would have you believe it’s sappy, frou-frou, romantic love that makes the omniverse go round, but _no_ , that’s not always the case.  They can love different people in different ways, and sometimes, they love _things_ , or places, or ideals.”

Emily raised an eyebrow.  “So?  Why does that matter?”

“Because I have to _understand_.”  Nyarlathotep abruptly shifted into the humanoid form he most often used with mortals and glared down at her.  “What _is_ it?  Is love like us, one thing with a thousand different faces?  How could Vader love his wife and his child, yet kill one and give his life for another?  He made me theorize that only romantic love is the selfish kind—but then Ren, Vader’s descendent no less, sacrifices everything for his lover and ruins _that_ theory, too.”  He gritted his newly-formed teeth with a growl of frustration.

“Nyarlathotep, if you’re trying to reason out what love is, you’ll be experimenting for the rest of eternity,” Emily told him.  “We can’t know.  It isn’t for us.”

Nyarlathotep eyed her for a moment, then muttered, “You’re so sure of that?”

She didn’t answer his question and instead asked, “One more thing—were you really going to send Ren off to Azathoth?”

“How did you know about that?” Nyarlathotep snapped.

“For one thing, it’s what you usually try to do,” replied Emily.  “But Dameron told me as well.  He and Ren have been back to Serannian several times since you saw them last.”

Nyarlathotep huffed, “Hmph.  He asked to go there, so yes, I was going to give him what he wanted.”

“That was never what he wanted, and you know it.  And I don’t believe it was all just an intellectual experiment for you either,” Emily said.  “His grandfather escaped you in the end, and you wanted to punish him for it—for the ‘audacity’ he inherited.”  Her pretty, youthful face set itself into a scowl, and suddenly she seemed very ancient, older than Nyarlathotep himself. . . which she was, older even than Azathoth by a instant or two.

“You failed, again,” she announced.  “Ren is learning to be happy, and learning how to love more and more.  If you truly want to learn what love is, you would do better to give up on your studies and come to Serannian, instead.  You’ll see far more of love there.”

Nyarlathotep glowered at her before he turned away.  “You know how unwelcome I’d be there.”

“Do _you_ know that?”  Emily’s voice no longer sounded so sharp or so preachy as it had a moment ago.  “It’s been a long time since you were there last.  Perhaps you’ve been forgiven.”

When the Crawling Chaos began to laugh, shrill and almost hysterical, Emily sighed and disappeared from Kadath in the cold wastes, returning instead to the rose and gold city of dreams floating where the sea meets the sky.

\--

The End


End file.
